
Qass XI K ^ 6*5* 
Book-' W 87 

PRESENTED BV" | Q ^ I 



RUSSIA 
IN THE SHADOWS 

H. G. WELLS 




STEEET SCENERY IN PETERSBURG: 

SITE OF A DEMOLISHED WOODEN HOUSE. 



Frontispiece. 



RUSSIA 
IN THE SHADOWS 



J'. BY 

AUTHOR OF "the OUTLINE OF HISTORY,'* 

**MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH," 

ETC., ETC. 



ILLUSTRATED 




NEW XBr YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 







COPYRIGHT, 1921, 
BT GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANT 

Gift 

HAS n ^9 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 

Ii Petersburg in Collapse ? * k 


{»AGB 

15 


II 


Drift and Salvage . . • . 


41 


III 


The Quintessence of Bolshevism: 


71 


IV 


The Creative Effort in Russia . 


105 


V 


The Petersburg Soviet: A Legis- 
lative Mass Meeting . 


135 


VI 


The Dreamer in the Kremlin , 


145 


VII 


The Envoy .•,,.. 


171 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

PLATB 

I Street Scenery in Petersburg: 
Site of Demolished Wooden 
House ..... Frontispiece 

PAGE 

II Street Scenery in Petersburg . 24 
Mr. Wells Discovers a Street 

UNDER Repair 24 

III A Petersburg Street Car En 

Route . 33 

Messrs. Lenin and Wells in 

Conversation 33 

IV Gorky in the Great Dump op Art 

AND Virtuosity in Petersburg . 56 

V The Statue of Marx outside the 
Smolny Institute ( Headquar- 
ters OF THE Communist Party) 73 

YI The Baku Conference Swears Un- 
dying Hostility to Capitalism 
AND British Imperialism: Zeno- 
vieff, Radek and Bela Kun . 92 

VII The Baku Conference Swears Un- 
dying Hostility to Capitalism 
and British Imperialism: The 
Body of the Hall ., s . . 93 

Vll 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

PLATE PAGE 

VIII Proletarians of Asia a la Baku . 112 

IX Guests at the Home of Rest for 
Workmen on the Kamenni 

OSTROF 129 

X The Petersburg Soviet in Ses- 
sion: Lenin at the Rostrum, 
Zenovieff ani> the President, 
Officials and Official Visitors 148 

XI Lenin, Gorky, Zorin, Zenovieff 

AND Radek * 165 



VIU 



I. PETERSBURG IN COLLAPSE 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 



PETERSBURG IN COLLAPSE 

IN January 1914 I visited Petersburg and 
Moscow for a couple of weeks; in Sep- 
tember 1920 I was asked to repeat this visit 
by Mr. Kameney, of the Russian Trade 
Delegation in London. I snatched at this 
suggestion, and went to Russia at the end 
of September with my son, who speaks a 
little Russian. We spent a fortnight and a 
day in Russia, passing most of our time in 
Petersburg, where we went about freely by 
ourselves, and were shown nearly everything 
we asked to see. We visited Moscow, and 
I had a long conversation with Mr. Lenin, 
which I shall relate. In Petersburg I did 
not stay at the Hotel International, to which 
foreign visitors are usually sent, but with my 

15 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

old friend, Maxim Gorky. The guide and 
interpreter assigned to assist us was a lady 
I Bad met in Russia in 1914, the niece of 
a former Russian Ambassador to London. 
She was educated at Newnham, she has 
been imprisoned five times by the Bolshevist 
Government, she is not allowed to leave 
Petersburg because of an attempt to cross 
the frontier to her children in Esthonia, 
and she was, therefore, the last person likely 
to lend herself to any attempt to hoodwink 
me. I mention this because on every hand 
at home and in Russia I had been told that 
the most elaborate camouflage of realities 
would go on, and that I should be kept in 
blinkers throughout my visit. 

As a matter of fact, the harsh and terrible 
realities of the situation in Russia cannot 
be camouflaged. In the case of special dele- 
gations, perhaps, a certain distracting tu- 
mult of receptions, bands, and speeches may 
be possible, and may be attempted. But it is 
hardly possible to dress up two large cities 
for the benefit of two stray visitors, wander- 
ing observantly often in different directions. 

16 



PETERSBURG IN COLLAPSE 

Naturally, when one demands to see a school 
or a prison one is not shown the worst. Any 
country would in the circumstances show the 
best it had, and Soviet Russia is no excep- 
tion. One can allow for that. 

Our dominant impression of things Rus- 
sian is an impression of a vast irreparable 
breakdown. The great monarchy that was 
here in 1914 and the administrative, social, 
financial, and commercial systems connected 
with it have, under the strains of six years 
of incessant war, fallen down and smashed 
utterly. Never in all history has there been 
so great a debacle before. The fact of the 
Revolution is, to our minds, altogether 
dwarfed by the fact of this downfall. By 
its own inherent rottenness and by the 
thrusts and strains of aggressive imperial- 
ism the Russian part of the old civilised 
world that existed before 1914 fell, and is 
now gone. The peasant, who was the base 
of the old pyramid, remains upon the land, 
living very much as he has always lived. 
Everything else is broken down, or is break- 
ing down. Amid this vast disorganisation 

IT 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

an emergency Government, supported by a 
disciplined party of perhaps 150,000 adher- 
ents — the Communist Party — has taken 
control. It has — at the price of much shoot- 
ing — suppressed brigandage, established a 
sort of order and security in the exhausted 
towns, and set up a crude rationing system. 

It is, I would say at once, the only pos- 
sible Government in Russia at the present 
time. It is the only idea, it supplies the 
only solidarity, left in Russia. But it is a 
secondary fact. The dominant fact for the 
Western reader, the threatening and dis- 
concerting fact, is that a social and economic 
system very like our own and intimately con- 
nected with our own has crashed. 

Nowhere in all Russia is the fact of that 
crash so completely evident as it is in Peters- 
burg. Petersburg was the artificial creation 
of Peter the Great; his bronze statue in 
the little garden near the Admiralty still 
prances amid the ebbing life of the city. 
Its palaces are still and empty, or strangely 
refurnished with the typewriters and tables 
and plank partitions of a new Administra- 

18 



PETERSBURG IN COLLAPSE 

tion which is engaged chiefly in a strenuous 
struggle against famine and the foreign in- 
vader. Its streets were streets of busy shops. 
In 1914 I loafed agreeably in the Peters- 
burg streets — buying little articles and 
watching the abundant traffic. All these 
shops have ceased. There are perhaps half 
a dozen shops still open in Petersburg. 
There is a Government crockery shop where 
I bought a plate or so as a souvenir, for 
seven or eight hundred roubles each, and 
there are a few flower shops. It is a wonder- 
ful fact, I think, that in this city, in which 
most of the shrinldng population is already 
nearly starving, and hardly any one pos- 
sesses a second suit of clothes or more than 
a single change of worn and patched linen„ 
flowers can be and are still bought and sold. 
For five thousand roubles, which is about 
six and eightpence at the current rate of 
exchange, one can get a very pleasing bunch 
of big chrysanthemums. 

I do not know if the words "all the shops 
have ceased" convey any picture to the 
Western reader of what a street looks like 

19 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

in Russia. It is not like Bond Street or 
Piccadilly on a Sunday, with the blinds neat- 
ly drawn down in a decorous sleep, and 
ready to wake up and begin again on Mon- 
day. The shops have an utterly wretched 
and abandoned look; paint is peeling off, 
windows are cracked, some are broken and 
boarded up, some still display a few fly- 
blown relics of stock in the window, some 
have their windows covered with notices; 
the windows are growing dim, the fixtures 
have gathered two years' dust. They are 
dead shops. They will never open again. 

All the great bazaar-like markets are 
closed, too, in Petersburg now, in the des- 
perate struggle to keep a public control of 
necessities and prevent the profiteer driving 
up the last vestiges of food to incredible 
prices. And this cessation of shops makes 
walking about the streets seem a silly sort 
of thing to do. Nobody "walks about" any 
more. One realises that a modern city is 
really nothing but long alleys of shops and 
restaurants and the like. Shut them up, and 
the meaning of a street has disappeared. 

20 



PETERSBURG IN COLLAPSE 

People hurry past — a thin traffic compared 
with my memories of 1914. The electric 
street cars are still running and busy — ^until 
six o'clock. They are the only means of 
locomotion for ordinary people remaining 
in town — the last legacy of capitalist enter- 
prise. They became free while we were in 
Petersburg. Previously there had been a 
charge of two or three roubles — ^the hun- 
dredth part of the price of an egg. Freeing 
them made little difference in their extreme 
congestion during the home-going hours. 
Every one scrambles on the tramcar. If 
there is no room inside you cluster outside. 
In the busy hours festoons of people hang 
outside by any handhold; people are fre- 
quently pushed off, and accidents are fre- 
quent. We saw a crowd collected round a 
child cut in half by a tramcar, and two peo- 
ple in the little circle in which we moved in 
Petersburg had broken their legs in tram- 
way accidents. 

The roads along which these tramcars run 
are in a frightful condition. They have not 
been repaired for three or four years; they 

21 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

are full of holes like shell-holes, often two 
or three feet deep. Frost has eaten ovX 
great cavities, drains have collapsed, and 
people have torn up the wood pavement for 
fires. Only once did we see any attempt to 
repair the streets in Petrograd. In a side 
street some mysterious agency had collected 
a load of wood blocks and two barrels of 
tar. Most of our longer journeys about the 
town were done in official motor-cars — left 
over from the former times. A drive is an 
affair of tremendous swerves and concus- 
sions. These surviving motor-cars are run- 
ning now on kerosene. They disengage 
clouds of pale blue smoke, and start up with 
a noise like a machine-gun battle. Every 
wooden house was demolished for firing last 
winter, and such masonry as there was in 
those houses remains in ruinous gaps, be- 
tween the houses of stone. 

Every one is shabby; every one seems to 
be carrying bundles in both Petersburg and 
Moscow. To walk into some side street in 
the twilight and see nothing but ill-clad 
figures, all hurrying, all carrying loads, 

22 




STREET SCENERY IN PETERSBURG. 




MR. WELLS DISCOVERS A STREET UNDER REPAIR. 



PETERSBURG IN COLLAPSE 

gives one an impression as though the en- 
tire population was setting out in flight. 
That impression is not altogether mislead- 
ing. The Bolshevik statistics I have seen 
are perfectly frank and honest in the matter. 
The population of Petersburg has fallen 
from 1,200,000 to a little over 700,000, and 
it is still falling. Many of the people have 
returned to peasant life in the country, 
many have gone abroad, but hardship has 
taken an enormous toll of this city. The 
death-rate in Petersburg is over 81 per 
1,000; formerly it was high among Euro- 
pean cities at 22. The birth-rate of the 
underfed and profoundly depressed popula- 
tion is about 15. It was formerly about 30. 
These bundles that every one carries are 
partly the rations of food that are doled out 
by the Soviet organisation, partly they are 
the material and results of illicit trade. The 
Russian population has always been a trad- 
ing and bargaining population. Even in 
1914 there were but few shops in Peters- 
burg whose prices were really fixed prices. 
Tariffs were abominated ; in Moscow taking 

25 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

a droshky meant always a haggle, ten ko- 
pecks at a time. Confronted with a shortage 
of nearly every commodity, a shortage 
caused partly by the war strain, — for Russia 
has been at war continuously now for six 
years — partly by the general collapse of 
social organisation, and partly by the block- 
ade, and with a currency in complete dis- 
order, the only possible way to save the 
towns from a chaos of cornering, profiteer- 
ing, starvation, and at last a mere savage 
fight for the remnants of food and common 
necessities, was some sort of collective con- 
trol and rationing. 

The Soviet Government rations on prin- 
ciple, but any Government in Russia now 
would have to ration. If the war in the 
West had lasted up to the present time Lon- 
don would be rationing too — food, cloth- 
ing, and housing. But in Russia this has 
to be done on a basis of uncontrollable peas- 
ant production, with a population tempera- 
mentally indisciplined and self-indulgent. 
The struggle is necessarily a bitter one. The 
detected profiteer, the genuine profiteer who 

26 



PETERSBURG IN COLLAPSE 

profiteers on any considerable scale, gets 
short shrift; he is shot. Quite ordinary 
trading may be punished severely. All trad- 
ing is called "speculation," and is now il- 
legal. But a queer street-corner trading 
in food and so forth is winked at in Peters- 
burg, and quite openly practised in Moscow, 
because only by permitting this can the 
peasants be induced to bring in food. 

There is also much underground trade 
between buyers and sellers who know each 
other. Every one who can supplements his 
public rations in this way. And every rail- 
way station at which one stops is an open 
market. We would find a crowd of peasants 
at every stopping-place waiting to sell milk, 
eggs, apples, bread, and so forth. The pas- 
sengers clamber down and accumulate bun- 
dles. An egg or an apple costs 300 roubles. 

The peasants look well fed, and I doubt 
if they are very much worse oif than they 
were in 1914. Probably they are better off. 
They have more land than they had, and 
they have got rid of their landlords. They 
will not help in any attempt to overthrow 

27 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

the Soviet Government because they are 
convinced that while it endures this state 
of things will continue. This does not pre- 
vent their resisting whenever they can the 
attempts of the Red Guards to collect food 
at regulation prices. Insufficient forces of 
Red Guards may be attacked and massacred. 
Such incidents are magnified in the London 
Press as peasant insurrections against the 
Bolsheviks. They are nothing of the sort. 
It is just the peasants making themselves 
comfortable under the existing regime. 

But every class above the peasants — in- 
cluding the official class — is now in a state of 
extreme privation. The credit and indus- 
trial system that produced commodities has 
broken down, and so far the attempts to 
replace it by some other form of production 
have been ineffective. So that nowhere are 
there any new things. About the only things 
that seem to be fairly well supplied are tea, 
cigarettes, and matches. Matches are more 
abundant in Russia than they were in Eng- 
land in 1917, and the Soviet State match is 
quite a good match. But such things as 

28 



PETERSBURG IN COLLAPSE 

collars, ties, shoelaces, sheets and blankets, 
spoons and forks, all the haberdashery and 
crockery of life, are unattainable. There is 
no replacing a broken cup or glass except by 
a sedulous search and illegal trading. From 
Petersburg to Moscow we were given a 
sleeping car de luxe, but there were no 
water-bottles, glasses, or, indeed, any loose 
fittings. They have all gone. IMost of the 
men one meets strike one at first as being 
carelessly shaven, and at first we were in- 
clined to regard that as a sign of a general 
apathy, but we understood better how things 
were when a friend mentioned to my son 
quite casually that he had been using one 
safety razor blade for nearly a year. 

Drugs and any medicines are equally un- 
attainable. There is nothing to take for a 
cold or a headache; no packing off to bed 
with a hot-water bottle. Small ailments de- 
velop very easily therefore into serious 
trouble. Nearly everybody we met struck 
us as being uncomfortable and a little out 
of health. A buoyant, healthy person is 

29 



^ 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

very rare in this atmosphere of discomforts 
and petty deficiencies. 

If any one falls into a real illness the out- 
look is grim. ]My son paid a \dsit to the big 
ObuchoYskayai Hospital, and he tells me 
things were very miserable there indeed. 
There was an appalling lack of every sort 
of material, and half the beds were not in 
use through the sheer impossibihty of deal- 
ing with more patients if they came in. 
Strengthening and stimulating food is out 
of the question unless the patient's family 
can by some miracle procure it outside and 
send it in. Operations are performed only 
on one day in the week. Dr. Federoff told 
me, when the necessary preparations can 
be made. On other days they are impos- 
sible, and the patient must wait. 

Hardly any one in Petersburg has much 
more than a change of raiment, and in a 
great city in which there remains no means 
of comLmunication but a few overcrowded 
tramcars,* old, leaky, and ill-fitting boots 

* I saw one passenger steamboat on the Neva crowded 
with passengers. Usually; the river was quite deserted ex- 
cept for a rare Government tug or a solitary boatman pick- 
ing up drift timber. 

30 



PETERSBURG IN COLLAPSE 

are the only footwear. At times one sees 
astonishing makeshifts by way of costume. 
The master of a school to which we paid a 
surprise visit struck me as unusually dap- 
per. He was wearing a dinner suit with a 
blue serge waistcoat. Several of the dis- 
tinguished scientific and literary men I met; 
had no collars and wore neck-wraps. Gorky 
possesses only the one suit of clothes he 
wears. 

At a gathering of literary people in 
Petersburg, Mr. Amphiteatroff, the well- 
known writer, addressed a long and bitter 
speech to me. He suffered from the usual 
delusion that I was blind and stupid and 
being hoodwinked. He was for taking off 
the respectable-looking coats of all the com- 
pany present in order that I might see for 
myself the rags and tatters and pitiful ex- 
pedients beneath. It was a painful and, 
so far as I was concerned, an unnecessary 
speech, but I quote it here to emphasise this 
effect of general destitution. And this un- 
derclad town population in this dismantled 
and ruinous city is, in spite of all the furtive 

31 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

trading that goes on, appallingly underfed. 
With the best will in the world the Soviet 
Government is unable to produce a sufficient 
ration to sustain a healthy life. We went 
to a district kitchen and saw the normal food 
distribution going on. The place seemed to 
us fairly clean and fairly well run, but that 
does not compensate for a lack of material. 
The lowest grade ration consisted of a basin- 
ful of thin skilly and about the same quan- 
tity of stewed apple compote. People have 
bread cards and wait in queues for bread, 
but for three days the Petersburg bakeries 
stopped for lack of flour. The bread varies 
greatly in quality; some was good coarse 
brown bread, and some I found damp, clay- 
like, and uneatable. 

I do not know how far these disconnected 
details will suffice to give the Western read- 
er an idea of what ordinary life in Peters- 
burg is at the present time. Moscow, they 
say, is more overcrowded and shorter of fuel 
than Petersburg, but superficially it looked 
far less grim than Petersburg. We saw 
these things in October, in a particularly 

32 




A PETERSBURG STREET CAR EN ROUTE. 




MESSRS. LENIN AND WELLS IN CONVERSATION. 



PETERSBURG IN <:OLLAPSE 

fine and warm October. We saw them in 
sunshine in a setting of ruddy and golden 
foliage. But one day there came a chill, 
and the yellow lea^^'-s went whirling before 
a drive of snowflaKcs. It was the first 
breath of the coming winter. Every one 
shivered and looked out of the double win- 
dows — already sealed up — and talked to us 
of the previous year. Then the glow of 
October returned. 

It was still glorious sunshine when we 
left Russia. But when I think of that com- 
ing winter my heart sinks. The Soviet Gov- 
ernment in the commune of the north has 
made extraordinary efforts to prepare for 
the time of need. There are piles of wood 
along the quays, along the middle of the 
main streets, in the courtyards, and every- 
where where wood can be piled. Last year 
many people had to live in rooms below the 
freezing point ; the water-pipes froze up, the 
sanitary machinery ceased to work. The 
reader must imagine the consequences. Peo- 
ple huddled together in the ill-lit rooms, and 
kept themselves alive with tea and talk. 

35 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

Presently some Russian novelist will tell us 
all that this has meant to heart and mind in 
Russia. This year it may not be quite so 
bad as that. The food situation also, they 
say, is better, but this I very much doubt. 
The railways are now in an extreme state of 
deterioration; the wood-stoked engines are 
wearing out; the bolts start and the rails 
shift as the trains rumble along at a maxi- 
mum of twenty-five miles per hour. Even 
were the railways more efficient, Wrangel 
has got hold of the southern food supplies. 
Soon the cold rain will be falling upon these 
700,000 souls still left in Petersburg, and 
then the snow. The long nights extend and 
the daylight dwindles. 

And this spectacle of misery and ebbing 
energy is, you will say, the result of Bolshe- 
vist rule! I do not believe it is. I will deal 
with the Bolshevist Government w^hen I have 
painted the general scenery of our problem. 
But let me say here that this desolate Russia 
is not a system that has been attacked and 
destroyed by something vigorous and mahg- 
nant. It is an unsound system that has 

36 



PETERSBURG IN COLLAPSE 

worked itself out and fallen down. It was 
not communism which built up these great, 
impossible cities, but capitalism. It was 
not communism that plunged this huge, 
creaking, bankrupt empire into six years of 
exhausting war. It was European imperial- 
ism. Nor is it communism that has pestered 
this suffering and perhaps dying Russia 
with a series of subsidised raids, invasions, 
and insurrections, and inflicted upon it an 
atrocious blockade. The vindictive French 
creditor, the journalistic British oaf, are far 
more responsible for these deathbed miseries 
than any communist. But to these questions 
I will return after I have given a little more 
description of Russia as we saw it during 
our visit. It is only when one has some 
conception of the physical and mental real- 
ities of the Russian collapse that we can see 
and estimate the Bolshevist Government in 
its proper proportions. 



m 



n. DRIFT AND SALVAGE 



II 

DRIFT AND SALVAGE 

AMONG the things I wanted most to 
see amidst this tremendous spectacle 
of social collapse in Russia was the work of 
my old friend Maxim Gorky. I had heard 
of this from members of the returning labour 
delegation, and what they told me had whet- 
ted my desire for a closer view of what was 
going on. Mr. Bertrand Russell's account 
of Gorky's health had also made me anxious 
on his own account ; but I am happy to say 
that upon that score my news is good. Gorky 
seems as strong and well to me now as he 
was when I knew him first in 1906. And as 
a personality he has grown immensely. Mr. 
Russell wrote that Gorky is dying and that 
perhaps culture in Russia is dying too. Mr. 
Russell was, I think, betrayed by the artistic 
temptation of a dark and purple concluding 

41 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

passage. He found Gorky in bed and af- 
flicted by a fit of coughing, and his imagina- 
tion made the most of it. 

Gorky's position in Russia is a quite ex- 
traordinary and personal one. He is no 
more of a communist than I am, and I have 
heard him argue with the utmost freedom 
in his flat against the extremist positions 
with such men as Bokaiev, recently the head 
of the extraordinary commission in Peters- 
burg, and Zalutsky, one of the rising leaders 
of the Communist party. It was a very re- 
assuring display of free speech, for Gorky 
did not so much argue as denounce — and 
this in front of two deeply interested Eng- 
lish enquirers. 

But he has gained the confidence and re- 
spect of most of the Bolshevik leaders, and 
he has become by a kind of necessity the 
semi-official salvage man under the new 
regime. He is possessed by a passionate 
sense of the value of Western science and 
culture, and by the necessity of preserving 
the intellectual continuity of Russian life 
through these dark years of famine and war 

42 



DRIFT AND SALVAGE 

and social stress, with the general intellec- 
tual Hfe of the world. He has found a 
steady supporter in Lenin. His work il- 
luminates the situation to an extraordinary 
degree because it collects together a num- 
ber of significant factors and makes the 
essentially catastrophic nature of the Rus- 
sian situation plain. 

The Russian smash at the end of 1917 
was certainly the completest that has ever 
happened to any modern social organisation. 
After the failure of the Kerensky Govern- 
ment to make peace and of the British naval 
authorities to relieve the military situation 
in the Baltic, the shattered Russian armies, 
weapons in hand, broke up and rolled back 
upon Russia, a flood of peasant soldiers 
making for home, without hope, without 
supplies, without discipline. That time of 
debacle was a time of complete social dis- 
order. It was a social dissolution. In many 
jparts of Russia there was a peasant revolt. 
There was chateau-burning often accompa- 
nied by quite horrible atrocities. It was an 
explosion of the very worst side of human 

4a 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

nature in despair, and for most of the abomi- 
nations committed the Bolsheviks are about 
as responsible as the Government of Aus- 
tralia. People would be held up and robbed 
even to their shirts in open daylight in the 
streets of Petersburg and Moscow, no one 
interfering. Murdered bodies lay disre- 
garded in the gutters sometimes for a whole 
day, with passengers on the footwalk gcAng 
to and fro. Armed men; often professing 
to be Red Guards, entered houses and looted 
and murdered. The early months of 1918 
saw a violent struggle of the new Bolshevik 
Government not only with counter-revolu- 
tions but with robbers and brigands of every 
description. It was not until the summer of 
1918, and after thousands of looters and 
plunderers had been shot, that life began to 
be ordinarily safe again in the streets of 
the Russian great towns. For a time Russia 
was not a civilisation, but a torrent of law- 
less violence, with a weak central Govern- 
ment of inexperienced rulers, fighting not 
only against unintelligent foreign interven- 
tion but against the completest internal dis- 

44 



DRIFT AND SALVAGE 

order. It is from such chaotic conditions 
that Russia still struggles to emerge. 

Art, literature, science, all the refinements 
and elaboration of life, all that we mean by 
"civilisation," were involved in this torren- 
tial catastrophe. For a time the stablest 
thing in Russia culture was the theatre. 
There stood the theatres, and nobody want- 
ed to loot them or destroy them ; the artists 
were accustomed to meet and work in them 
and went on meeting and working; the tradi- 
tion of official subsidies held good. So quite 
amazingly the Russian dramatic and ope- 
ratic life kept on through the extremest 
storms of violence, and keeps on to this day. 
In Petersburg we found there were more 
than forty shows going on every night; in 
Moscow we found very much the same state 
of affairs. We heard Shalyapin, greatest 
of actors and singers, in The Barber of 
Seville and in Chovanchina; the admirable 
orchestra was variously attired, but the con- 
ductor still held out valiantly in swallow tails 
and a white tie; we saw a performance of 
SadkOj we saw Monachof in The Tzarevitch 

45 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

Aleccei and as lago in Othello (with Madame 
Gorky — Madame Andreievna — as Desde- 
mona). When one faced the stage, it was 
as if nothing had changed in Russia; but 
when the curtain fell and one turned to the 
audience one realised the revolution. There 
were now no brilliant uniforms, no evening 
dress in boxes and stalls. The audience 
was a uniform mass of people, the same 
sort of people everywhere, attentive, good- 
humoured, well-behaved and shabby. Like 
the London Stage Society, one's place in 
the house is determined by ballot. And for 
the most part there is no paying to go to 
the theatre. For one performance the tick- 
ets go, let us say, to the professional unions, 
for another to the Red Army and their 
families, for another to the school children, 
and so on. A certain selling of tickets goes 
on, but it is not in the present scheme of 
things. 

I had heard Shalyapin in London, but 
I had not met him personally there. We 
made his acquaintance this time in Peters- 
burg, we dined with him and saw something 

46 



DRIFT AND SALVAGE 

of his very jolly household. There are two 
stepchildren almost grown up, and two little 
daughters, who speak a nice, stilff, correct 
English, and the youngest of whom dances 
delightfully. Shalyapin is certainly one of 
the most wonderful things in Russia at the 
present time. He is the Artist, defiant 
and magnificent. Off the stage he has much 
the same vitality and abounding humour that 
made an encounter with Beerbohm Tree so 
delightful an experience. He refuses ab- 
solutely to sing except for pay — 200,000 
roubles a performance, they say, which is 
nearly £15 — and when the markets get too 
tight, he insists upon payment in flour or 
eggs or the like. What he demands he gets, 
for Shalyapin on strike would leave too 
dismal a hole altogether in the theatrical 
world of Petersburg. So it is that he main- 
tains what is perhaps the last fairly com- 
fortable home in Russia. And Madame 
Shalyapin we found so unbroken by the 
revolution that she asked us what people 
were wearing in London. The last fashion 

47 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

papers she had seen — thanks to the blockade 
— dated from somewhen early in 1918. 

But the position of the theatre among the 
arts is peculiar. For the rest of the arts, 
for literature generally and for the scientific 
worker, the catastrophe of 1917-18 was over- 
whelming. There remained no one to buy 
books or pictures, and the scientific worker 
found himself with a salary of roubles that 
dwindled rapidly to less than the five-hun- 
dredth part of their original value. The 
new crude social organisation, fighting rob- 
bery, murder, and the wildest disorder, had 
no place for them; it had forgotten them. 
For the scientific man at first the Soviet 
Government had as little regard as the first 
French revolution, which had "no need for 
chemists." These classes of worker, vitally 
important to every civilised system, were re- 
duced, therefore, to a state of the utmost 
privation and misery. It was to their assist- 
ance and salvation that Gorky's first efforts 
were directed. Thanks very largely to him 
and to the more creative intelligences in the 
Bolshevik Government, there has now been 

48 



DRIFT AND SALVAGE 

organised a group of salvage establishments, 
of which the best and most fully developed 
is the House of Science in Petersburg, in 
the ancient palace of the Archduchess Marie 
Pavlova. Here we saw the headquarters of 
a special rationing system which provides as 
well as it can for the needs of four thousand 
scientific workers and their dependents — in 
all perhaps for ten thousand people. At this 
centre they not only draw their food rations, 
but they can get baths and barber, tailoring, 
cobbling and the like conveniences. There 
is even a small stock of boots and clothing. 
There are bedrooms, and a sort of hospital 
accommodation for cases of weakness and 
ill-health. 

It was to me one of the strangest of my 
Russian experiences to go to this institution 
and to meet there, as careworn and unpros- 
perous-looking figures, some of the great 
survivors of the Russian scientific world. 
Here were such men as Oldenburg the ori- 
entahst, Karpinsky the geologist, Pavloff 
the Nobel prizeman, Radloff, Bielopolsky, 
and the hke, names of world-wide celebrity. 

49 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

They asked me a multitude of questions 
about recent scientific progress in the world 
outside Russia, and made me ashamed of 
my frightful ignorance of such matters. If 
I had known that this would happen I would 
have taken some sort of report with me. Our 
blockade has cut them off from all scientifiq 
literature outside Russia. They are with- 
out new instruments, they are short of 
paper, the work they do has to go on in un- 
warmed laboratories. It is amazing they do 
any work at all. Yet they are getting work 
done; Pavloff is carrying on research of 
astonishing scope and ingenuity upon the 
mentality of animals; Manuchin claims to 
have worked out an effectual cure for tuber- 
culosis, even in advanced cases; and so on. 
I have brought back abstracts of Manuchin's 
work for translation and publication here, 
and they are now being put into English. 
The scientific spirit is a wonderful spirit. 
If Petersburg starves this winter, the House 
of Science — unless we make some special 
eflPort on its behalf — ^will starve too, but 
these scientific men said very little to m§ 

50 



DRIFT AND SALVAGE 

about the possibility of sending them in sup- 
plies. The House of Literature and Art 
talked a little of want and miseries, but not 
the scientific men. What they were all keen 
about was the possibility of getting scientific 
publications; they value knowledge more 
than bread. Upon that matter I hope I may 
be of some help to them. I got them to form 
a committee to make me out a list of all the 
books and publications of which they stood 
in need, and I have brought this list back to 
the Secretary of the Royal Society of Lon- 
don, which had already been stirring in this 
matter. Funds will be needed, three or four 
thousand pounds perhaps (the address of 
the Secretary of the Royal Society is Bur- 
lington House, W.), but the assent of the 
Bolshevik Government and our own to this 
mental provisioning of Russia has been se- 
cured, and in a little time I hope the first 
parcel of books will be going through to 
these men, who have been cut off for so 
long from the general mental life of the 
world. 

If I had no other reason for satisfaction 

51 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

about this trip to Russia, I should find quite 
enough in the hope and comfort our mere 
presence evidently gave to many of these 
distinguished men in the House of Science 
and in the House of Literature and Art. 
Upon many of them there had evidently 
settled a kind of despair of ever seeing or 
hearing anything of the outer world again. 
They had been living for three years, very 
grey and long years indeed, in a world that 
seemed sinking down steadily through one 
degree of privation after another into utter 
darkness. Possibly they had seen something 
of one or two of the political deputations 
that have visited Russia — I do not know; 
but manifestly they had never expected to 
see again a free and independent individual 
walk in, with an air of having come quite 
easily and unofficially from London, and of 
its being quite possible not only to come but 
to go again into the lost world of the West. 
It was like an unexpected afternoon caller 
strolling into a cell in a jail. 

All musical people in England know the 
work of Glazounov; he has conducted con- 

52 



DRIFT AND SALVAGE 

certs in London and is an honorary doctor 
both of Oxford and Cambridge. I was very 
deeply touched by my meeting with him. 
He used to be a very big florid man, but 
now he is pallid and very much fallen away, 
so that his clothes hang loosely on him. He 
came and talked of his friends Sir Hubert 
Parry and Sir Charles Vilhers Stanford. 
He told me he still composed, but that his 
stock of music paper was almost exhausted. 
"Then there will be no more." I said there 
would be much more, and that soon. He 
doubted it. He spoke of London and Ox- 
ford; I could see that he was consumed by 
an almost intolerable longing for some great 
city full of life, a city wdth abundance, with 
pleasant crowds, a city that would give him 
still audiences in warm, brightly-lit places. 
While I was there, I was a sort of living 
token to him that such things could still be. 
He turned his back on the window which 
gave on the cold grey Neva, deserted in the 
twilight, and the low lines of the fortress 
prison of St. Peter and St. Paul. "In Eng- 
land there will be no revolution — no ? I had 

53 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

many friends in England — many good 
friends in England. ..." I was loth to 
leave him, and he was very loth to let me go. 
Seeing all these distinguished men living 
a sort of refugee life amidst the impover- 
ished ruins of the fallen imperialist system 
has made me realise how helplessly depend- 
ent the man of exceptional gifts is upon a 
securely organised civilisation. The ordi- 
nary man can turn from this to that occupa- 
tion; he can be a sailor or a worker in a 
factory or a digger or what not. He is 
under a general necessity to work, but he 
has no internal demon which compels him 
to do a particular thing and nothing else, 
which compels him to be a particular thing 
or die. But a Shalyapin must be Shalyapm 
or nothing, Pavloff is Pavloff and Glazoun- 
ov is Glazounov. So long as they can go on 
doing their particular thing, such men will 
live and flourish. Shalyapin still acts and 
sings magnificently — in absolute defiance of 
every Communist principle; Pavloff still 
continues his marvellous researches — in an 
old coat and with his study piled up with the 

54 




GORKY IN THE GREAT DUMP OF ART AND VIRTUOSITY IN PI;TERSBURG 



DRIFT AND SALVAGE 

potatoes and carrots he grows in his spare 
time; Glazounov will compose until the pa- 
per runs out. But many of the others are evi- 
dently stricken much harder. The mortality 
among the intellectually distinguished men 
of Russia has been terribly high. ]\Iuch, no 
doubt, has been due to the general hardship 
of life, but in many cases I believe that the 
sheer mortification of great gifts become fu- 
tile has been the determining cause. They 
could no more live in the Russia of 1919 
than they could have lived in a Kaffir kraal. 

Science, art, and hterature are hothouse 
plants demanding warmth and respect and 
service. It is the paradox of science that 
it alters the whole world and is produced 
by the genius of men who need protection 
and help more than any other class of work- 
er. The collapse of the Russian imperial 
system has smashed up all the shelters in 
which such things could exist. The crude 
Marxist philosophy which divides all men 
into bourgeoisie and proletariat, which sees 
all social life as a stupidly simple * 'class 
war," had no knowledge of the conditions 

57 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

necessary for the collective mental life. But 
it is to the credit of the Bolshevik Govern- 
ment that it has now risen to the danger of 
a universal intellectual destruction in Rus- 
sia, and that, in spite of the blockade and 
the unending struggle against the subsidised 
revolts and invasions with which we and the 
French plague Russia, it is now permitting 
and helping these salvage organisations. 
Parallel with the House of Science is the 
House of Literature and Art. The writing 
of new books, except for some poetry, and 
the painting of pictures have ceased in Rus- 
sia. But the bulk of the writers and artists 
have been found employment upon a gran- 
diose scheme for the publication of a sort of 
Russian encyclopaedia of the literature of 
the world. In this strange Russia of con- 
flict, cold, famine and pitiful privations there 
is actually going on now a literary task that 
would be inconceivable in the rich England 
and the rich America of to-day. In Eng- 
land and America the production of good 
literature at popular prices has practically 
ceased now — "because of the price of paper." 

58 



DRIFT AND SALVAGE 

The mental food of the English and Ameri- 
can masses dwindles and deteriorates, and 
nobody in authority cares a rap. The Bol- 
shevik Government is at least a shade above 
that level. In starving Russia hundreds of 
people are working upon translations, and 
the books they translate are being set up 
and printed, work which may presently give 
a new Russia such a knowledge of world 
thought as no other people will possess. I 
have seen some of the books and the work 
going on. ''May'"" I write, with no certainty. 
Because, like everything else in this ruined 
country, this creative work is essentially 
improvised and fragmentary. How this 
world literature is to be distributed to the 
Russian people I do not know. The book- 
shops are closed and bookselling, like every 
other form of trading, is illegal. Probably 
the books will be distributed to schools and 
other institutions. 

In this matter of book distribution the 
Bolshevik authorities are clearly at a loss. 
They are at a loss upon very many such 
matters. In regard to the intellectual life 

59 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

of the community one discovers that Marx- 
ist Communism is without plans and without 
ideas. Marxist Communism has always been 
a theory of revolution, a theory not merely 
lacking in creative and constructive ideas, 
but hostile to creative and constructive ideas. 
Every Communist orator has been trained 
to contemn "Utopianism," that is to say, 
has been trained to contemn intelligent 
planning. Not even a British business man 
of the older type is quite such a believer in 
things righting themselves and in "mud- 
dling through" as these Marxists. The Rus- 
sian Communist Government now finds 'it- 
self face to face, among a multiplicity of 
other constructive problems, with the prob- 
lem of sustaining scientific life, of sustain- 
ing thought and discussion, of promoting 
artistic creation. Marx the Prophet and his 
Sacred Book supply it with no lead at all 
in the matter. Bolshevism, having no 
schemes, must improvise therefore — clumsi- 
ly, and is reduced to these pathetic attempts 
to salvage the wreckage of the intellectual 
life of the old order. And that life is very 

60 



DRIFT AND SALVAGE 

sick and unhappy and seems likely to die 
on its hands. 

It is not simply scientific and literary work 
and workers that Maxim Gorky is trying 
to salvage in Russia. There is a third and 
still more curious salvage organisation as- 
sociated with him. This is the Expertise 
Commission, which has its headquarters in 
the former British Embassy. When a social 
order based on private property crashes, 
when private property is with some abrupt- 
ness and no qualification abolished, this does 
not abolish and destroy the things which 
have hitherto constituted private property. 
Houses and their gear remain standing, still 
being occupied and used by the people who 
had them before — except when those people 
have fled. When the Bolshevik authorities 
requisition a house or take over a deserted 
palace, they find themselves faced by this 
problem of the gear. Any one who knows 
human nature will understand that there 
has been a certain amount of quiet annexa- 
tion of desirable things by inadvertent oiB- 
cials and, perhaps less inadvertently, by 

61 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

their wives. But the general spirit of Bol- 
shevism is quite honest, and it is set very 
stoutly against looting and suchlike develop- 
ments of individual enterprise. There has 
evidently been comparatively little looting 
either in Petersburg or JNIoscow since the 
days of the debacle. Looting died against 
the wall in Moscow in the spring of 1918. 
In the guest houses and suchhke places we 
noted that everything was numbered and 
listed. Occasionally we saw odd things 
astray, fine glass or crested silver upon tables 
where it seemed out of place, but in many 
cases these were things which had been sold 
for food or suchlike necessities on the part 
of the original owners. The sailor courier 
who attended to our comfort to and from 
Moscow was provided with a beautiful little 
silver teapot that must once have brightened 
a charming drawing-room. But apparently 
it had taken to a semi-public life in a quite 
legitimate way. 

For greater security there has been a 
gathering together and a cataloguing of 
everything that could claim to be a work 

62 



DRIFT AND SALVAGE 

of art by this Expertise Commission. The 
palace that once sheltered the British Em- 
bassy is now like some congested second- 
hand art shop in the Brompton Road. We 
went through room after room piled with 
the beautiful lumber of the former Russian 
social system. There are big rooms crammed 
with statuary; never have I seen so many 
white marble Venuses and sylphs together, 
not even in the Naples Museum. There are 
stacks of pictures of every sort, passages 
choked with inlaid cabinets piled up to the 
ceiUng; a room full of cases of old lace, 
piles of magnificent furniture. This accu- 
mulation has been counted and catalogued. 
And there it is. I could not find out that 
any one had any idea of what was ultimately 
to be done with all this lovely and elegant 
litter. The stuff does not seem to belong 
in any way to the new world, if it is indeed 
a new world that the Russian Communists 
are organising. They never anticipated that 
they would have to deal with such things. 
Just as they never really thought of what 
they would do with the shops and markets 

63 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

when they had aboHshed shopping and 
marketing. Just as they had never thought 
out the problem of converting a city of pri- 
vate palaces into a Communist gathering- 
place. Marxist theory had led their minds 
up to the "dictatorship of the class-conscious 
proletariat" and then intimated — ^we dis- 
cover now how vaguely — ^that there would 
be a new heaven and a new earth. Had 
that happened it would indeed have been a 
revolution in human affairs. But as we saw 
Russia there is still the old heaven and the 
old earth, covered with the ruins, littered 
with the abandoned furnishings and dislo- 
cated machinery of the former system, with 
the old peasant tough and obstinate upon 
the soil — and Communism, ruling in the 
cities quite pluckily and honestly, and yet, 
in so many matters, like a conjurer who has 
left his pigeon and his rabbit behind him, 
and can produce nothing whatever from the 
hat. 

Ruin: that is the primary Russian fact 
at the present time. The revolution, the 
Conmiunist rule, which I will proceed to de- 

64 



DRIFT AND SiiLVAGE 

scribe in my next paper, is quite secondary 
to that. It is something that has happened 
in the ruin and because of the ruin. It is of 
primary importance that people in the West 
should realise that. If the Great War had 
gone on for a year or so more, Germany 
and then the Western Powers would prob- 
ably have repeated, with local variations, 
the Russian crash. The state of affairs we 
have seen in Russia is only the intensifica- 
tion and completion of the state of affairs 
towards which Britain was drifting in 1918. 
Here also there are shortages such as we had 
in England, but they are relatively mon- 
strous; here also is rationing, but it is rela- 
tively feeble and inefficient; the profiteer in 
Russia is not fined but shot, and for the 
English D.O.R.A. you have the Extraor- 
dinary Commission. What were nuisances 
in England are magnified to disasters in 
Russia. That is all the difference. For all I 
know. Western Europe may be still drift- 
ing even now towards a parallel crash. I 
am not by any means sure that we have 
turned the comer. War, self-indulgence, 

65 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

and unproductive speculation may still be 
wasting more than the Western world is pro- 
ducing; in which case our own crash — cur- 
rency failure, a universal shortage, social 
and political collapse and all the rest of it 
— is merely a question of time. The shops of 
Regent Street will follow the shops of the 
Nevsky Prospect, and Mr. Galsworthy and 
Mr. Bennett will have to do what they can to 
salvage the art treasures of Mayfair. It 
falsifies the whole world situation, it sets 
people altogether astray in their political 
actions, to assert that the frightful destitu- 
tion of Russia to-day is to any large extent 
the result merely of Communist effort; that 
the wicked Communists have pulled down 
Russia to her present plight, and that if you 
can overthrow the Communists every one 
and everything in Russia will suddenly be- 
come happy again. Russia fell into its pres- 
ent miseries through the world war and the 
moral and intellectual insufficiency of its 
ruling and wealthy people. (As our own 
British State — as presently even the Ameri- 
can State — may fall. ) They had neither the 

66 



DRIFT AND SALVAGE 

brains nor the conscience to stop warfare, 
stop wa^te of all sorts, and stop taking the 
best of everything and lea\^ng every one 
else dangerously unhappy, until it was too 
late. They ruled and wasted and quarrelled, 
blind to the coming disaster up to the very 
moment of its occurrence. And then, as I 
will describe in my next paper, the Com- 
munist came in. . . .j 



67 



m. THE QUINTESSENCE OF 
BOLSHEVISM 



Ill 

THE QUINTESSENCE OF BOLSHEVISM: 

IN the two preceding papers I have tried 
to give the reader my impression of Rus- 
sian life as I saw it in Petersburg and Mos- 
cow, as a spectacle of collapse, as the col- 
lapse of a political, social, and economic sys- 
tem, akin to our own but weaker and more 
rotten than our own, which has crashed un- 
der the pressure of six years of war and 
misgovernment. The main collapse oc- 
curred in 1917 when Tsarism, brutishly in- * 
competent, became manifestly impossible. 
It had wasted the whole land, lost control 
of its army and the confidence of the entire 
population. Its police system had degen- 
erated into a regime of violence and brigand- 
age. It fell inevitably. 

And there was no alternative government. 

71 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

For generations the chief energies of Tsar- 
ism had been directed to destroying any 
possibility of an alternative government. It 
had subsisted on that one fact that, bad as 
it was, there was nothing else to put in its 
place. The first Russian Revolution, there- 
fore, turned Russia into a debating society 
and a political scramble. The liberal forces 
of the country, unaccustomed to action or 
responsibility, set up a clamorous discussion 
whether Russia was to be a constitutional 
monarchy, a liberal republic, a socialist re- 
public, or what not. Over the confusion 
gesticulated Kerensky in attitudes of the 
finest liberalism. Through it loomed vari- 
ous ambiguous adventurers, *'strong men," 
sham strong men, Russian monks and Rus- 
sian Bonapartes. What remained of so- 
cial order collapsed. In the closing months 
of 1917 murder and robbery were common 
street incidents in Petersburg and Moscow, 
as common as an automobile accident in the 
streets of London, and less heeded. On the 
Reval boat was an American who had for- 
merly directed the affairs of the American 

72 




THE STATUE OF MARX OUTSIDE THE SMOLNY INSTITUTE. 
(Headquarters of the Communist Party.) 



QUINTESSENCE OF BOLSHEVISM 

Harvester Company in Russia. He had 
been in Moscow during this phase of com- 
plete disorder. He discribed hold-ups in 
open daylight in busy streets, dead bodies 
lying for hours in the gutter — as a dead kit- 
ten might do in a western town — ^while 
crowds went about their business along the 
sidewalk. 

Through this fevered and confused coun- 
try went the representatives of Britain and 
France, blind to the quality of the immense 
and tragic disaster about them, intent only 
upon the war, badgering the Russians to 
keep on fighting and make a fresh offensive 
against Germany. But when the Germans 
made a strong thrust towards Petersburg 
through the Baltic provinces and by sea, 
the British Admiralty, either through sheer 
cowardice or through Royalist intrigues, 
failed to give any effectual help to Russia. 
Upon this matter the evidence of the late 
Lord Fisher is plain. And so this unhappy 
country, mortally sick and, as it were, deliri- 
ous, staggered towards a further stage of 
collapse. 

75 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

From end to end of Russia, and in the 
Russian-speaking community throughout 
the world, there existed only one sort of 
people who had common general ideas upon 
which to work, a common faith and a com- 
mon will, and that was the Communist party. 
While all the rest of Russia was either apa- 
thetic like the peasantry or garrulously at 
sixes and sevens or given over to violence or 
fear, the Communists believed and were pre- 
pared to act. Numerically they were and 
are a very small part of the Russian popu- 
lation. At the present time not one per 
cent, of the people in Russia are Commu- 
nists ; the organised party certainly does not 
number more than 600,000 and has probably 
not much more than 150,000 active members. 
Nevertheless, because it was in those terrible 
days the only organisation which gave men 
a common idea of action, common formulae, 
and mutual confidence, it was able to seize 
and retain control of the smashed empire. 
It was and it is the only sort of administra- 
tive solidarity possible in Russia. These 
ambiguous adventurers who have been and 

76 



QUINTESSENCE OF BOLSHEVISM 

are afflicting Russia, with the support of 
the Western Powers, Deniken, Kolchak, 
Wrangel and the like, stand for no guiding 
principle and offer no security of any sort 
upon which men's confidence can crystallise. 
They are essentially brigands. The Com- 
munist party, however one may criticise it, 
does embody an idea and can be relied upon 
to stand by its idea. So far it is a thing 
morally higher than anything that has yet 
iCome against it. It at once secured the 
passive support of the peasant mass by per- 
mitting them to take land from the estates 
and by making peace with Germany. It 
restored order — after a frightful lot of 
shooting — in the great towns. For a time 
everybody found carrying arms without au- 
thority was shot. This action was clumsy 
and bloody but effective. To retain its pow- 
er this Communist Government organised 
Extraordinary Commissions, with practical- 
ly unlimited powers, and crushed out all 
opposition by a Red Terror. Much that 
that Red Terror did was cruel and frightful, 
it was largely controlled by narrow-minded 

77 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

men, and many of its officials were inspired 
by social hatred and the fear of counter- 
revolution, but if it was fanatical it was 
honest. Apart from individual atrocities it 
did on the whole kill for a reason and to 
an end. Its bloodshed was not like the silly 
aimless butcheries of the Deniken regime, 
which would not even recognise, I was told, 
the Bolshevik Red Cross. And to-day the 
Bolshevik Government sits, I believe, in 
Moscow as securely established as any Gov- 
ernment in Europe, and the streets of the 
Russian towns are as safe as any streets in 
Europe. 

It not only established itself and restored 
order, but — thanks largely to the genius of 
that ex-pacifist Trotsky — it re-created the 
Russian army as a fighting force. That we 
must recognise as a very remarkable achieve- 
ment. I saw little of the Russian army my- 
self, it was not what I went to Russia to 
see, but Mr. Vanderlip, the distinguished 
American financier, whom I found in Mos- 
cow engaged in some financial negotiations 
with the Soviet Government, had been treat- 

78 



jQUINTESSENCE OF BOLSHEVISM 

ed to a review of several thousand troops, 
and was very enthusiastic ahout their spirit 
and equipment. My son and I saw a num- 
ber of drafts going to the front, and also 
bodies of recruits joining up, and our im- 
pression is that the spirit of the men was 
quite as good as that of similar bodies of 
British recruits in London in 1917-18. 

Now who are these Bolsheviki who have 
taken such an effectual hold upon Russia? 
According to the crazier section of the Brit- 
ish Press they are the agents of a mysterious 
racial plot, a secret society, in which Jews, 
Jesuits, Freemasons, and Germans are all 
jumbled together in the maddest fashion. 
As a matter of fact, nothing was ever quite 
less secret than the ideas and aims and meth- 
ods of the Bolsheviks, nor anything quite 
less like a secret society than their organiza- 
tion. But in England we cultivate a pe- 
culiar style of thinking, so impervious to 
any general ideas that it must needs fall 
back upon the notion of a conspiracy to ex- 
plain the simplest reactions of the human 
mind. If, for instance, a day labourer in 

79 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

Essex makes a fuss because he finds that the 
price of his children's boots has risen out of 
all proportion to the increase in his weekly 
wages, and declares that he and his fellow- 
workers are being cheated and underpaid, 
the editors of The Times and of the Morn- 
ing Post will trace his resentment to the 
insidious propaganda of some mysterious so- 
ciety at Konigsberg or Pekin. They cannot 
conceive how otherwise he should get such 
ideas into his head. Conspiracy mania of 
this kind is so prevalent that I feel con- 
strained to apologise for my own immunity. 
I find the Bolsheviks very much what they 
profess to be. I find myself obliged to treat 
them as fairly straightforward people. I 
do not agree with either their views or their 
methods, but that is another question. 

The Bolsheviks are Marxists Sociahsts. 
Marx died in London nearly forty years 
-ago; the propaganda of his views has been 
going on for over half a century. It has 
spread over the whole earth and finds in 
nearly every country a small but enthusiastic 
following. It is a natural result of world- 

80 



QUINTESSENCE OF BOLSHEVISM 

wide economic conditions. Everywhere it 
expresses the same hmited ideas in the same 
distinctive phrasing. It is a cult, a world- 
wide international brotherhood. No one need 
learn Russian to study the ideas of Bol- 
shevism. The enquirer will find them all in 
the London Plebs or the New York Uhera- 
ior in exactly the same phrases as in the 
Russian Pravda, They hide nothing. They 
say everything. And just precisely what 
these Marxists write and say, so they at- 
tempt to do. 

It will be best if I write about Marx 
without any hypocritical deference. I have 
always regarded him as a Bore of the ex- 
tremest sort. His vast unfinished work, Das 
Kapitalj a cadence of wearisome volumes 
about such phantom unrealities as the bour- 
geoisie and the proletariat^ a book for ever 
maundering away into tedious secondary 
discussions, impresses me as a monument of 
pretentious pedantry. But before I went 
to Russia on this last occasion I had no ac- 
tive hostility to Marx. I avoided his works, 
and when I encountered Marxists I disposed 

81 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

of them by asking them to tell me exactly 
what people constituted the proletariat. 
None of them knew. No Marxist knows. In 
Gorky's flat I listened with attention while 
Bokaiev discussed with Shalyapin the fine 
question of whether in Russia there was a 
proletariat at all, distinguishable from the 
peasants. As Bokaiev has been head of the 
Extraordinary Commission of the Dictator- 
ship of the Proletariat in Petersburg, it was 
interesting to note the fine difficulties of the 
argument. The "proletarian" in the Marx- 
ist jargon is hke the "producer" in the jar- 
gon of some political economists, who is sup- 
posed to be a creature absolutely distinct 
and different from the "consumer." So the 
proletarian is a figure put into flat opposi- 
tion to something called capital. I find in 
large type outside the current number of the 
Plehs, "The working class and the employ- 
ing class have nothing in common." Apply 
this to a works foreman who is being taken 
in a train by an engine-driver to see how 
the house he is having built for him by a 
building society is getting on. To which of 

82 



QUINTESSENCE OF BOLSHEVISM 

these immiscibles does he belong, employer 
or employed? The stuff is sheer nonsense. 

In Russia I must confess my passive ob- 
jection to Marx has changed to a very active 
hostility. Wherever we went we encoun- 
tered busts, portraits, and statues of Marx. 
About two-thirds of the face of Marx is 
beard, a vast solemn woolly uneventful 
beard that must have made all normal exer- 
cise impossible. It is not the sort of beard 
that happens to a man, it is a beard culti- 
vated, cherished, and thrust patriarchally 
upon the world. It is exactly like Das Kapi- 
tal in its inane abundance, and the human 
part of the face looks over it owlishly as if it 
looked to see how the growth impressed 
mankind. I found the omnipresent images 
of that beard more and more irritating. A 
gnawing desire grew upon me to see Karl 
Marx shaved. Some day, if I am spared, I 
will take up shears and a razor against Das 
Kapital; I will write The Shaving of Karl 
Marx, 

But Marx is for the Marxists merely an 
image and a symbol, and it is with the Marx- 

83 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

ist and not with Marx that we are now deal- 
ing. Few Marxists have read much of Das 
Kapital, The Marxist is very much the 
same sort of person in all modern communi- 
ties, and I will confess that by my tempera- 
ment and circumstances I have the very 
warmest sympathy for him. He adopts 
Marx as his prophet simply because he be- 
lieves that Marx wrote of the class war, an 
implacable war of the employed against the 
employer, and that he prophesied a triumph 
for the employed person, a dictatorship of 
the world by the leaders of these liberated 
employed persons (dictatorship of the pro- 
letariat), and a Communist millennium aris- 
ing out of that dictatorship. Now this doc- 
trine and this prophecy have appealed in 
every country with extraordinary power to 
young persons, and particularly to young 
men of energy and imagination who have 
found themselves at the outset of life im- 
perfectly educated, ill-equipped, and caught 
into hopeless wages slavery in our existing 
economic system. They realise in their own 
persons the social injustice, the stupid neg- 

84 



QUINTESSENCE OF BOLSHEVISM 

ligence, the colossal incivility of our system ; 
they realise that they are insulted and sacri- 
ficed by it; and they devote themselves to 
break it and emancipate themselves from it. 
No insidious propaganda is needed to make 
such rebels ; it is the faults of a system that 
half- educates and then enslaves them which 
have created the Communist movement 
wherever industrialism has developed. There 
would have been Marxists if Marx had never 
lived. When I was a boy of fourteen I was 
a complete Marxist, long before I had heard 
the name of Marx. I had been cut off 
abruptly from education, caught in a detest- 
able shop, and I was being broken in to a life 
of mean and dreary toil. I was worked too 
hard and for such long hours that all 
thoughts of self -improvement seemed hope- 
less. I would have set fire to that place if 
I had not been convinced it was over-in- 
sured. I revived the spirit of those bitter 
days in a conversation I had with Zorin, one 
of the leaders of the Commune of the North. 
He is a young man who has come back from 
unskilled work in America, a very likable 

85 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

human being and a humorous and very pop- 
ular speaker in the Petersburg Soviet. He 
and I e:s:changed experiences, and I found 
that the thing that rankled most in his mind 
about America was the brutal incivility he 
had encountered when applying for a job 
as packer in a big dry goods store in New 
York. We told each other stories of the 
way our social system wastes and breaks 
and maddens decent and willing men. Be- 
tween us was the freemasonry of a common, 
indignation. 

It is that indignation of youth and en- 
ergy, thwarted and misused, it is that and no 
mere economic theorising, which is the living 
and linking inspiration of the Marxist move- 
ment throughout the world. It is not that 
Marx was profoundly wise, but that our 
economic system has been stupid, selfish, 
wasteful, and anarchistic. The Communis- 
tic organisation has provided for this angry 
recalcitrance certain shibboleths and pass- 
words: "Workers of the World unite," and 
so forth. It has suggested to them an idea 
of a great conspiracy against human happi- 

86 



QUINTESSENCE OF BOLSHEVISM 

ness concocted by a mysterious body of wick- 
ed men called capitalists. For in this men-, 
tally enfeebled world in which we live to-day 
conspiracy mania on one side finds its echo 
on the other, and it is hard to persuade a 
Marxist that capitalists are in their totality 
no more than a scrambling disorder of mean- 
spirited and short-sighted men. And the 
Communist propaganda has knitted all these 
angry and disinherited spirits together into 
a world-wide organisation of revolt — and 
hope — formless though that hope proves to 
be on examination. It has chosen Marx for 
its prophet and red for its colour. . . . 
And so when the crash came in Russia, 
when there remained no other solidarity of 
men who could work together upon any but 
immediate selfish ends, there came flowing 
back from America and the West to rejoin 
their comrades a considerable number of 
keen and enthusiastic young and youngish 
men, who had in that more bracing Western 
world lost something of the habitual im- 
practicability of the Russian and acquired a 
certain habit of getting things done, who 

87 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

all thought in the same phrases and had the 
courage of the same ideas, and who were all 
inspired by the dream of a revolution that 
should bring human life to a new level of 
justice and happiness. It is these young men 
who constitute the living force of Bolshe- 
vism. Many of them are Jews, because most 
of the Russian emigrants to America were 
Jews ; but few of them have any strong racial 
Jewish feeling. They are not out for Jewry 
but for a new world. So far from being in 
continuation of the Jewish tradition the Bol- 
sheviks have put most of the Zionist leaders 
in Russia in prison, and they have prescribed 
the teaching of Hebrew as a "reactionary" 
language. Several of the most interesting 
Bolsheviks I met were not Jews at all, but 
blonde Nordic men. Lenin, the beloved lead- 
er of all that is energetic in Russia to-day, 
has a Tartar type of face and is certainly 
no Jew. 

This Bolshevik Government is at once the 
most temerarious and the least experienced 
governing body in the world. In some di- 
rections its incompetence is amazing. In 

88 



QUINTESSENCE OF BOLSHEVISM 

most its ignorance is profound. Of the dia- 
bolical cunning of "capitalism" and of the 
subtleties of reaction it is ridiculously sus- 
picious, and sometimes it takes fright and is 
cruel. But essentially it is honest. It is 
the most simple-minded Government that 
exists in the world to-day. 

Its simple-mindedness is shown by one 
question that I was asked again and again 
during this Russian visit. "When is the so- 
cial revolution going to happen in Eng- 
land ?" Lenin asked me that, Zenovieff , who 
is the head of the Commune of the North, 
Zorin, and many others. 

Because it is by the Marxist theory all 
wrong that the social revolution should hap- 
pen first in Russia. That fact is bothering 
every intelligent man in the movement. 
According to the Marxist theory the social 
revolution should have happened first in the 
country with the oldest and most highly de- 
veloped industrialism, with a large, definite, 
mainly propertyless, mainly wages-earning 
working class (proletariat) . It should have 
begun in Britain, and spread to France and 

89 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

Germany, then should have come America's 
turn and so on. Instead they find Commu- 
nism in power in Russia, which really pos- 
sesses no specialised labouring class at all, 
which has worked its factories with peasant 
labourers who come and go from the villages, 
and so has scarcely any "proletariat" — ^to 
unite with the workers of the world and so 
forth — at all. Behind the minds of many 
of these Bolsheviks with whom I talked I 
saw clearly that there dawns now a chill 
suspicion of the reahty of the case, a realisa- 
tion that what they have got in Russia is not 
truly the promised Marxist social revolution 
at all, that in truth they have not captured 
a State but got aboard a derelict. I tried 
to assist the development of this novel and 
disconcerting discovery. And also I in- 
dulged in a little lecture on the absence of 
a large * 'class-conscious proletariat" in the 
Western communities. I explained that in 
England there were two hundred different 
classes at least, and that the only "class- 
conscious proletarians" known to me in the 
land were a small band of mainly Scotch 

90 




I— I 

« g 

Eh -3 

^ 'J 

«§• 

g^ 
t-l 0) 

in <S 

^^ 

*< o 

g^ 

I- 
O ■» 

H § 

W § 
EHtSJ 



QUINTESSENCE OF BOLSHEVISM 

workers kept together by the vigorous lead- 
ership of a gentleman named MacManus. 
Their dearest convictions struggled against 
my manifest candour. They are clinging 
desperately to the belief that there are hun- 
dreds of thousands of convinced Commu- 
nists in Britain, versed in the whole gospel 
of Marx, a proletarian solidarity, on the eve 
of seizing power and proclaiming a British 
Soviet Republic. They hold obstinately to 
that after three years of waiting — but their 
hold weakens. 

Among the most amusing things in this 
queer intellectual situation are the repeated 
scoldings that come by wireless from Mos- 
cow to Western Labour because it does not 
behave as Marx said it would behave. It 
isn't red — and it ought to be. It is just 
yellow. 

My conversation with Zenovieff was par- 
ticularly curious. He is a man with the 
voice and animation of Hilaire Belloc, and 
a lot of curly coal-black hair. "You have 
civil war in Ireland," he said. "Prac- 
tically," said I. "Which do you consider 

95 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

are the proletarians, the Sinn Feiners or 
the Ulstermen?" We spent some time 
while Zenovieff worked like a man with a 
jigsaw puzzle trying to get the Irish sit- 
uation into the class war formula. That 
jigsaw puzzle remained unsolved, and we 
then shifted our attention to Asia. Im- 
patient at the long delay of the Western 
proletarians to emerge and declare them- 
selves, Zenovieff, assisted by Bela Kun, 
our Mr. Jack Quelch, and a number of 
other leading Communists, has recently 
gone on a pilgrimage to Baku to raise the 
Asiatic proletariat. They went to beat up 
the class-conscious wages slaves of Persia 
and Turkestan. They sought out factory 
workers and slum dwellers in the tents of 
the steppes. They held a congress at 
Baku, at which they gathered together a 
quite wonderful accumulation of white, 
black, brown, and yellow people, Asiatic 
costumes and astonishing weapons. They 
had a great assembly in which they swore 
undying hatred of Capitalism and British 
imperialism; they had a great procession 

96 



QUINTESSENCE ORBOLSHEVISM 

in which I regret to say certain batteries 
of British guns, which some careless, hasty 
empire-builder had left behind him, figured ; 
they disinterred and buried again thirteen 
people whom this British empire-builder 
seems to have shot without trial, and they 
burnt Mr. Lloyd George, M. Miller and, 
and President Wilson in effigy. I not 
only saw a five-part film of this remarkable 
festival when I visited the Petersburg 
Soviet, but, thanks to Zorin, I have brought 
the film back with me. It is to be ad- 
ministered with caution and to adults only^ 
There are parts of it that would make 
Mr. Gwynne of the Morning Post or Mr. 
Rudyard Kipling scream in their sleep. If 
so be they ever slept again after seeing it. 
I did my best to find out from Zenovieff 
and Zorin what they thought they were 
doing in the Baku Conference. And frank- 
ly I do not think they know. I doubt 
if they have anything clearer in their minds 
than a vague idea of hitting back at the 
British Government through Mesopotamia 
and India, because it has been hitting them 

97 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

through Kolchak, Deniken, Wrangel, and 
the Poles. It is a counter-offensive al- 
most as clumsy and stupid as the offensives 
it would counter. It is inconceivable that 
they can hope for any social solidarity with 
the miscellaneous discontents their con- 
gress assembled. One item "featured" 
on this Baku film is a dance by a gentleman 
from the neighbourhood of Baku. He 
is in fact one of the main features of 
this remarkable film. He wears a fur- 
trimmed jacket, high boots, and a high 
cap, and his dancing is a very rapid and 
dexterous step dancing. He produces two 
knives and puts them between his teeth, 
and then two others which he balances 
perilously with the blades dangerously 
close to his nose on either side of it. Finally 
he poises a fifth knife on his forehead, 
still stepping it featly to the distinctly 
Oriental music. He stoops and squats, 
arms akimbo, sending his nimble boots fly- 
ing out and back like the Cossacks in the 
Russian ballet. He circles slowly as he 
does this, clapping his hands. He is now 

98 



QUINTESSENCE OF BOLSHEVISM 

rolled up in my keeping, ready to dance 
again when opportunity offers. I tried to 
find out whether he was a specimen Asiatic 
proletarian or just what he symbolised, but 
I could get no light on him. But there 
are yards and yards of film of him. I wish 
I could have resuscitated Karl Marx, just 
to watch that solemn stare over the beard, 
regarding him. The film gives no indica- 
tion of his reception by Mr. Jack Quelch. 
I hope I shall not offend Comrade Zorin, 
for whom I have a real friendship, if I 
thus confess to him that I cannot take his 
Baku Conference very seriously. It was 
an excursion, a pageant, a Beano. As a 
meeting of Asiatic proletarians it was pre- 
posterous. But if it was not very much 
in itself, it was something very important 
in its revelation of shifting intentions. Its 
chief significance to me is this, that it 
shows a new orientation of the Bolshevik 
mind as it is embodied in Zenovieff. So 
long as the Bolsheviki held firmly with 
unshaken conviction to the Marxist formula 
they looked westward, a little surprised 

99 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

that the "social revolution" should have 
begun so far to the east of its indicated 
centre. Now as they begin to realise that 
it is not that prescribed social revolution 
at all but something quite different which 
has brought them into power, they are nat- 
urally enough casting about for a new 
system of relationships. The ideal figure 
of the Russian republic is still a huge 
western "Worker," with a vast hammer or 
a sickle. A time may come, if we main- 
tain the European blockade with sufficient 
stringency and make any industrial re- 
cuperation impossible, when that ideal may 
give place altogether to a nomadic-looking 
gentleman from Turkestan with a number 
of knives. We may drive what will re- 
main of Bolshevik Russia to the steppes and 
the knife. If we help Baron Wr angel to 
pull down the by no means firmly estab- 
lished Government in Moscow, underf the 
delusion that thereby we shall bring about 
"representative institutions" and a "limited 
monarchy," we may find ourselves very 
much out in our calculations. Any one 

100 



QUINTESSENCE OF BOLSHEVISM 

who destroys the present law and order of 
Moscow will, I believe, destroy what is 
left of law and order in Russia. A brigand 
monarchist government will leave a trail of 
fresh blood across the Russian scene, show 
what gentlemen can do when they are 
roused in a tremendous pogrom and "V^Tiite 
Terror, flourish horribly for a time, break 
up and vanish. Asia will resume. The 
simple ancient rh}i;hm of the horseman 
plundering the peasant and the peasant 
waylaying the horseman will creep back 
across the plains to the Xiemen and the 
Dniester. The cities will become clusters of 
ruins in the waste; the roads and railroads 
will rot and rust; the river traffic will 
decay. . . . 

This Baku Conference has depressed 
Gorky profoundly. He is obsessed by a 
nightmare of Russia going east. Perhaps 
I have caught a little of his depression. 



101 



IV. THE CREATIVE EFFORT IN 
RUSSIA 



IV 

THE CREATIYE EFFORT IN RUSSIA 

IN the previous three papers I have 
tried to give my impression of the 
Russian spectacle as that of a rather ram- 
shackle modern civilisation completely shat- 
tered and overthrown by misgovernment, 
under-education, and finally six years of 
war strain. I have shown science and art 
starving and the comforts and many of 
the decencies of life gone. In Vienna 
the overthrow is just as bad; and there too 
such men of science as the late Professor 
Margules starve to death. If London had 
had to endure four more years of war, 
much the same sort of thing would be hap- 
pening in London. We should have now 
no coal in our grates and no food for our 
food tickets, and the shops in Bond Street 

105 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

would be as desolate as the shops in the 
Nevsky Prospect. Bolshevik government 
in Russia is neither responsible for the cau- 
sation nor for the continuance of these 
miseries. 

I have also tried to get the facts of 
Bolshevik rule into what I believe is their 
proper proportions in the picture. The 
Bolsheviks, albeit numbering less than five 
per cent of the population, have been able 
to seize and retain power in Russia be- 
cause they were and are the only body of 
people in this vast spectacle of Russian 
ruin with a common faith and a common 
spirit. I disbelieve in their faith, I ridi- 
cule Marx, their prophet, but I under- 
stand and respect their spirit. They are — 
with all their faults, and they have abun- 
dant faults — ^the only possible backbone now 
to a renascent Russia. The recivilising 
of Russia must be done with the Soviet 
Government as the starting phase. The 
great mass of the Russian population is 
an entirely illiterate peasantry, grossly 
materialistic and politically indifferent, 

106 



CREATIVE EFFORT IN RUSSIA 

They are superstitious, they are for ever 
crossing themselves and kissing images, — 
in Moscow particularly they were at it — 
but they are not religious. They have 
no will in things political and social be- 
yond their immediate satisfactions. They 
are roughly content with Bolshevik rule. 
The Orthodox priest is quite unlike the 
Catholic priest in Western Europe; he is 
himself typically a dirty and illiterate peas- 
ant with no power over the wills and con- 
sciences of his people. There is no con- 
structive quality in either peasant or Ortho- 
doxy. For the rest there is a confusion 
of more or less civilised Russians, in and 
out of Russia, with no common political 
ideas and with no common will. They are 
incapable of producing anything but ad- 
ventures and disputes. 

The Russian refugees in England are 
pohtically contemptible. They rehearse 
endless stories of "Bolshevik outrages*': 
chateau burnings by peasants, burglaries 
and murders by disbanded soldiers in the 
towns, back street crimes — ^they tell them 

107 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

all as acts of the Bolshevik Government. 
Ask them what government they want in 
its place, and you will get rubbishy gen- 
eralities — ^usually adapted to what the speak- 
er supposes to be your particular political 
obsession. Or they sicken you with the 
praise of some current super-man, Deniken 
or Wrangel, who is to put everything right 
— God knows how. They deserve nothing 
better than a Tsar, and they are incapable 
even of deciding which Tsar they desire. 
The better part of the educated people 
still in Russia are — for the sake of Russia — 
slowly drifting into a reluctant but honest 
co-operation with Bolshevik rule. 

The Bolsheviks themselves are Marxists 
and Communists. They find themselves 
in control of Russia, in complete contra- 
diction, as I have explained, to the theories 
of Karl Marx. A large part of their 
energies have been occupied in an entirely 
patriotic struggle against the raids, inva- 
sions, blockades, and persecutions of every 
sort that our insensate Western Govern- 
ments have rained upon :their tragically 

108 



CREATIVE EFFORT IN RUSSIA 

shattered country. What is left over goes 
in the attempt to keep Russia alive, and 
to organise some sort of social order among 
the ruins. These Bolsheviks are, as I have 
explained, extremely inexperienced men, 
intellectual exiles from Geneva and Hamp- 
stead, or comparatively illiterate manual 
workers from the United States. Never 
was there so amateurish a government 
since the early Moslem found themselves 
in control of Cairo, Damascus, and Meso- 
potamia. 

I believe that in the minds of very many 
of them there is a considerable element 
of dismay at the tremendous tasks they 
find before them. But one thing has helped 
them and Russia enormously, and that is 
their training in Communistic ideas. As 
the British found out during the submarine 
war, so far as the urban and industrial 
population goes there is nothing for it 
during a time of tragic scarcity but collapse 
or collective control. We in England had 
to control and ration, we had to suppress 
profiteering by stringent laws. These Com- 

109 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

munists came into power in Russia and 
began to do at once, on principle, the 
first most necessary thing in that chaos 
of social wreckage. Against all the habits 
and traditions of Russia, they began to 
control and ration — exhaustively. They 
have now a rationing system that is, on 
paper, admirable beyond cavil; and per- 
haps it works as well as the temperament 
and circumstances of Russian production 
and consumption permit. It is easy to 
note defects and failures, but not nearly 
so easy to show how in this depleted and 
demoralised Russia they could be avoided. 
And things are in such a state in Russia 
now that even if we suppose the Bolsheviks 
overthrown and any other Government in 
their place, it matters not what, that Gov- 
ernment would have to go on with the 
rationing the Bolsheviks have organised, 
with the supression of vague political ex- 
periments, and the punishment and shoot- 
ing of profiteers. The Bolsheviki in this 
state of siege and famine have done upon 

110 




1^ 

ID. 

< 

o 

OS 

< 
o 

PL4 



CREATIVE EFFORT IN RUSSIA 

principle what any other Government would 
have had to do from necessity. 

And in the face of gigantic difficulties 
they are trying to rebuild a new Russia 
among the ruins. We may quarrel with 
their principles and methods, we may call 
their schemes Utopian and so forth, we 
may sneer at or we may dread what they 
are doing, but it is no good pretending 
that there is no creative effort in Russia 
at the present time. A certain section of 
the Bolsheviks are hard-minded, doctrinaire 
and unteachable men, fanatics who believe 
that the mere destruction of capitalism, 
the disuse of money and trading, the eff ace- 
ment of all social differences, will in itself 
bring about a sort of bleak millennium. 
There are Bolsheviki so stupid that they 
would stop the teaching of chemistry in 
schools until they were assured it was "pro- 
letarian" chemistry, and who would sup- 
press every decorative design that was not 
an elaboration of the letters R.S.F.S.R. 
(Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Repub- 
lic) as reactionary art. I have told of the 

113 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

suppression of Hebrew studies because they 
are "reactionary"; and while I was with 
Gorky I found him in constant bitter dis- 
putes with extremist officials who would 
see no good in any literature of the past 
except the literature of revolt. But there 
were other more liberal minds in this new 
Russian world, minds which, given an op- 
portunity, will build and will probably 
build well. Among men of such construc- 
tive force I would quote such names as 
Lenin himself, who has developed won- 
derfully since the days of his exile, and who 
has recently written powerfully against the 
extravagances of his own extremists; Trot- 
sky, who has never been an extremist, and 
who is a man of very great organising abil- 
ity; Lunacharsky, the Minister for Educa- 
tion; Rikoff, the head of the Department 
of People's Economy; Madame Lilna of 
the Petersburg Child Welfare Department; 
and Krassin, the head of the London Trade 
Delegation. These are names that occur 
to me; it is by no means an exhaustive list 
of the statesmanlike elements in the Bol- 

114 



CREATIVE EFFORT IN RUSSIA 

shevik Government. Already they have 
achieved something, in spite of blockade 
and civil and foreign war. It is not only 
that they work to restore a country de- 
pleted of material to an extent almost in- 
conceivable to English and American read- 
ers, but they work with an extraordinarily 
unhelpful personnel. Russia to-day stands 
more in need of men of the foreman and 
works-manager class than she does of med- 
icaments or food. The ordinary work in 
the Government offices of Russia is shock- 
ingly done; the slackness and inaccuracy 
are indescribable. Everybody seems to be 
working in a muddle of unsorted papers 
and cigarette ends. This again is a state 
of affairs no counter-revolution could 
change. It is inherent in the present Rus- 
sian situation. If one of these military 
adventurers of the Yudenitch or Deniken 
type were, by some disastrous accident, to 
get control of Russia, his success would 
only add strong drink, embezzlement, and a 
great squalour of kept mistresses to the 
general complication. For whatever else 

115 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

we may say to the discredit of the Bolshevik 
leaders, it is undeniable that the great ma- 
jority lead not simply laborious but puri- 
tanical lives. 

I write of this general inefficiency in 
Russia with the more asperity because it 
was the cause of my not meeting Luna- 
charsky. About eighty hours of my life 
was consumed in travelling, telephoning, 
and waiting about in order to talk for about 
an hour and a half with Lenin and for the 
some time with Tchitcherin. At that rate, 
and in view of the intermittent boat service 
from Reval to Stockholm, to see Lunachar- 
sky would have meant at least a week more 
in Russia. The whole of my visit to Mos- 
cow was muddled in the most irritating 
fashion. A sailor-man carrying a silver 
kettle who did not know his way about 
Moscow was put in charge of my journey, 
and an American who did not know enough 
Russian to telephone freely was set to make 
my appointments in the town. Although 
I had heard Gorky arrange for my meet- 
ing with Lenin by long-distance telephone 

116 



CREATIVE EFFORT IN RUSSIA 

days before, JMoscow declared that it had 
had no notice of my coming. Finally I was 
put into the wrong train back to Peters- 
burg, a train which took twenty-two hours 
instead of fourteen for the journey. These 
may seem petty details to relate, but when 
it is remembered that Russia was really do- 
ing its best to impress me with its vigour 
and good order, they are extremely signifi- 
cant. In the train, when I realised that it 
was a slow train and that the express had 
gone three hours before while we had 
been pacing the hall of the guest house with 
our luggage packed and nobody coming for 
us, the spirit came upon me and my lips 
were unsealed. I spoke to my guide, as 
one mariner might speak to another, and 
told him what I thought of Russian meth- 
ods. He listened with the profoundest 
respect to my rich incisive phrases. When 
at last I paused, he replied — in words that 
are also significant of certain weaknesses 
of the present Russian state of mind. *'You 

see," he said, "the blockade " 

But if I saw nothing of Lunacharsky 

117 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

personally, I saw something of the work 
he has organised. The primary material 
of the educationist is human beings, and 
of these at least there is still no shortage 
in Russia, so that in that respect Lunachar- 
sky is better off than most of his colleagues. 
And beginning with an initial prejudice 
and much distrust, I am bound to confess 
that, in view of their enormous difficulties, 
the educational work of the Bolsheviks 
impresses me as being astonishingly good. 
Things started badly. Directly I got to 
Petersburg I asked to see a school, and 
on the second day of my visit I was taken 
to one that impressed me very unfavour- 
ably. It was extremely well equipped, 
much better than an ordinary English 
grammar school, and the children were 
bright and intelligent; but our visit fell in 
the recess. I could witness no teaching, and 
the behaviour of the youngsters I saw 
indicated a low standard of discipline. I 
formed an opinion that I was probably 
being shown a picked school specially pre- 
pared for me, and that this was all that 

118 



CREATIVE EFFORT IN RUSSIA 

Petersburg had to offer. The special guide 
who was with us then began to question 
these children upon the subject of English 
literature and the writers they liked most. 
One name dominated all others. My own. 
Such comparatively trivial figures as Mil- 
fon, Dickens, Shakespeare ran about inter- 
mittently between the feet of that literary 
colossus. Being questioned further, these 
children produced the titles of perhaps a 
dozen of my books. I said I was com- 
pletely satisfied by what I had seen and 
heard, that I wanted to see nothing more — 
for indeed what more could I possibly re- 
quire? — and I left that school smiling with 
difficulty and thoroughly cross with my 
guides. 

Three days later I suddenly scrapped 
my morning's engagements and insisted 
upon being taken at once to another school 
— any school close at hand. I was con- 
vinced that I had been deceived about the 
former school, and that now I should see a 
very bad school indeed. Instead I saw a 
much better one than the first I had seen. 

119 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

The equipment and building were better, 
the discipHne of the children was better, 
and I saw some excellent teaching in prog- 
ress. Most of the teachers were women, 
very competent-looking middle-aged wom- 
en, and I chose elementary geometrical 
teaching to observe because that on the 
blackboard is in the universal language of 
the diagram. I saw also a heap of draw- 
ings and various models the pupils had 
done, and they were very good. The 
school was supplied with abundant pic- 
tures. I noted particularly a well-chosen 
series of landscapes to assist the geograph- 
ical teaching. There was plenty of chemi- 
cal and physical apparatus, and it was 
evidently put to a proper use. I also saw 
the children's next meal in preparation — 
for children eat at school in Soviet Rus- 
sia — and the food was excellent and well 
cooked, far above the standard of the 
adult rations we had seen served out. All 
this was much more satisfactory. Finally 
by a few questions we tested the extraordi- 
nary vogue of H. G. Wells among the 

120 



CREATIVE EFFORT IN RUSSIA 

young people of Russia. None of these 
children had ever heard of him. The school 
library contained none of his books. This 
did much to convince me that I was seeing 
a quite normal school, I had, I now be- 
gin to realise, been taken to the previous 
one not, as I had supposed in my wrath, 
with any elaborate intention of deceiving 
me about the state of education in the 
country, but after certain kindly intrigues 
and preparations by a literary friend, ^Ir. 
Chukovsky the critic, affectionately anxious 
to make me feel myself beloved in Russia, 
and a little oblivious of the real gravity 
of the business I had in hand. 

Subsequent enquiries and comparison of 
my observations with those of other -visitors 
to Russia, and particularly those of Dr. 
Haden Guest, who also made surprise 
visits to several schools in JMoscow, have 
convinced me that Soviet Russia, in the 
face of gigantic difficulties, has made and 
is making very great educational efforts, 
and that in spite of the difficulties of the 
general situation the quality and number 

121 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

of the schools in the towns has risen abso- 
lutely since the Tsarist regime, (The 
peasant, as ever, except in a few "show" 
localities, remains scarcely touched by 
these things.) The schools I saw would 
have been good middle schools in England. 
They are open to all, and there is an 
attempt to make education compulsory. 
Of course Russia has its peculiar difficulties. 
Many of the schools are understaffed, 
and it is difficult to secure the attendance 
of unwilling pupils. Numbers of children 
prefer to keep out of the schools and 
trade upon the streets. A large part of 
the illicit trading in Russia is done by 
bands of children. They are harder to 
catch than adults, and the spirit of Russian 
Communism is against punishing them. 
And the Russian child is, for a northern 
child, remarkably precocious. 

The common practice of co-educating 
youngsters up to fifteen or sixteen, in a 
country as demoralised as Russia is now, 
has brought peculiar evils in its train. 
My attention was called to this by the 

122 



CREATIVE EFFORT IN RUSSIA 

visit of Bokaiev, the former head of the 
Petersburg Extraordinary Commission, and 
his colleague Zalutsky to Gorky to consult 
him in the matter. They discussed their 
business in front of me quite frankly, and 
the whole conversation was translated to 
me as it went on. The Bolshevik authori- 
ties have collected and published very 
startling, very shocking figures of the moral 
condition of young people in Petersburg, 
which I have seen. How far they would 
compare with the British figures^ — if there 
are any British figures — of such bad dis- 
tricts for the young as are some parts of 
East London or such towns of low type 
employment as Reading I do not know.' 
(The reader should compare the Fabian 
Society's report on prostitution. Down- 
ward Paths J upon this question.) Nor do 
I know how they would show in com- 
parison with preceding Tsarist conditions. 
Nor can I speculate how far these phe- 
nomena in Russia are the mechanical 
consequence of privation and overcrowding 
in a home atmosphere bordering on despair. 

123 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

But there can be no doubt that in the 
Russian towns, concurrently with increased 
educational effort and an enhanced intel- 
lectual stimulation of the young, there is 
also an increased lawlessness on their part, 
especially in sexual matters, and that this 
is going on in a phase of unexampled 
sobriety and harsh puritanical decorum so 
far as adult life is concerned. This hectic 
moral fever of the young is the dark side 
of the educational spectacle in Russia. I 
think it is to be regarded mainly as an 
aspect of the general social collapse; every 
European country has noted a parallel 
moral relaxation of the young under the 
war strain; but the revolution itself, in 
sv/eeping a number of the old experienced 
teachers out of the schools and in making 
every moral standard a subject of debate, 
has no doubt contributed also to an as 
yet incalculable amount in the excessive 
disorder of these matters in present-day 
Russia. 

Faced with this problem of starving and 
shattered homes and a social chaos, th§ 

124 



CREATIVE EFFORT IN RUSSIA 

Bolshevik organisers are institutionalising 
the town children of Russia. They are 
making their schools residential. The 
children of the Russian urban population 
are going, like the children of the British 
upper class, into boarding schools. Close 
to this second school I visited stood two 
big buildings which are the living places of 
the boys and of the girls respectively. In 
these places they can be kept under some 
sort of hygienic and moral discipline. 
This again happens to be not only in 
accordance with Communist doctrine, but 
with the special necessities of the Russiaii 
crisis. Entire towns are sinking down 
towards slum conditions, and the Bolshevik 
Government has had to play the part of a 
gigantic JDr. Barnardo. 

We went over the organisation of a sort 
of reception home to which children are 
brought by their parents who find it 
impossible to keep them clean and decent 
and nourished under the terrible conditions 
outside. This reception home is the old 
Hotel de I'Europe, the scene of countless 

125 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

pleasant little dinner-parties under the old 
regime. On the roof there is still the 
summertime roof garden, where the string 
quartette used to play, and on the staircase 
we passed a frosted glass window still 
bearing in gold letters the words Coiffure 
des Dames, 

Slender gilded pointing hands directed 
us to the "Restaurant," long vanished from 
the grim Petersburg scheme of things. 
Into this place the children come; they 
pass into a special quarantine section for 
infectious diseases and for personal cleanli- 
ness — nine-tenths of the newcomers har- 
bour unpleasant parasites — and then into 
another section, the moral quarantine, 
where for a time they are watched for bad 
habits and undesirable tendencies. From 
this section some individuals may need to 
be weeded out and sent to special schools 
for defectives. The rest pass on into 
the general body of institutionalized chil- 
dren, and so on to the boarding schools. 

Here certainly we have the * 'break-up 
of the family" in full progress, and the 

126 



CREATIVE EFFORT IN RUSSIA 

Bolshevik net is sweeping wide and taking 
in children of the most miscellaneous 
origins. The parents have reasonably free 
access to their children in the daytime, but 
little or no control over their education, 
clothing, or the like. We went among the 
children in the various stages of this 
educational process, and they seemed to 
us to be quite healthy, happy, and con- 
tented children. But they get very good 
people to look after them. Many men and 
women, politically suspects or openly dis- 
contented with the existing political con- 
ditions, and yet with a desire to serve 
Russia, have found in these places work 
that they can do with a good heart and 
conscience. My interpreter and the lady 
who took us round this place had often 
dined and supped in the Hotel de I'Europe 
in its brilliant days, and they knew each 
other well. This lady was now plainly clad, 
with short cut hair and a grave manner; 
her husband was a White and serving with 
the Poles; she had two children of her own 
in the institution, and she was mothering 

127 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

some scores of little creatures. But she 
was evidently keenly proud of the work of 
her organisation, and she said that she 
found life — ^in this city of want, under the 
shadow of a coming famine — more interest- 
ing and satisfying than it had ever been in 
the old days. 

I have no space to tell of other educa- 
tional work we saw going on in Russia. 
I can give but a word or t^o to the Home of 
Rest for Workmen in the Kamenni Ostrof. 
I thought that at once rather fine and not a 
little absurd. To this place workers are 
sent to live a life of refined ease for two or 
three weeks. It is a very beautiful country 
house with fine gardens, an orangery, and 
subordinate buildings. The meals are 
served on white cloths with flowers upon 
the table and so forth. And the worker 
has to live up to these elegant surroundings. 
It is a part of his education. If in a forget- 
ful moment he clears his throat in the 
good old resonant peasant manner and 
spits upon the floor, an attendant, I was 
told, chalks a circle about his defilement 

128 



CREATIVE EFFORT IN RUSSIA 

and obliges him to clean the offended 
parquetry. The avenue approaching this 
place has been adorned with decoration in 
the futurist style, and there is a vast figure 
of a "worker" at the gates resting on his 
hammer, done in gypsum, which was 
obtained from the surgical reserves of the 
Petersburg hospitals. ... But after all, 
the idea of civilising your workpeople by 
dipping them into pleasant surroundings 
is, in itself, rather a good one. . . . 

I find it difficult to hold the scales of 
justice upon many of these efforts of 
Bolshevism. Here are these creative and 
educational things going on, varying be- 
tween the admirable and the ridiculous, 
islands at least of cleanly work and, I 
think, of hope, amidst the vast spectacle of 
grisly want and wide decay. Who can 
weigh the power and possibility of their 
thrust against the huge gravitation of this 
sinking system? Who can guess what 
encouragement and enhancement they may 
get if Russia can win through to a respite 
from civil and foreign warfare and from 

131 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

famine and want? It was of this re-created 
Russia, this Russia that may be, that I 
was most desirous of talking when I went 
to the Kremlin to meet Lenin. Of that 
conversation I will tell in my sixth paper. 



132 



V. THE PETERSBURG SOVIET: A 
LEGISLATIVE MASS MEETING 



.V 



THE PETERSBURG SOVIET: A LEGISLATIVE 
MASS MEETING 

ON Thursday the 7th of October we at- 
tended a meeting of the Petersburg 
Soviet, We were told that we should find 
this a very different legislative body from 
the British House of Commons, and we 
did. Like nearly everything else in the 
arrangements of Soviet Russia it struck us 
as extraordinarily unpremeditated and im- 
provised. Nothing could have been less 
intelligently planned for the functions it 
had to perform or the responsibilities it 
had to undertake. 

The meeting was held in the old Winter 
Garden of the Tauride Palace, the former 
palace of Potemkin, the favourite of 
Catherine the Second. Here the Imperial 
Duma met under the Tsarist regime^ and 

135 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

I visited it in 1914 and saw a languid 
session in progress. I went then with Mr. 
Maurice Baring and one of the Bencken- 
doriFs to the strangers' gallery, which ran 
round three sides of the hall. There was 
accommodation for perhaps a thousand 
people in the hall, and most of it was empty. 
The president with his bell sat above a 
rostrum, and behind him was a row of 
women reporters. I do not now remember 
what business was in hand on that occasion; 
it was certainly not very exciting business. 
Baring, I remember, pointed out the large 
proportion of priests elected to the third 
Duma; their beards and cassocks made a 
very distinctive feature of that scattered 
gathering. 

On this second visit we were no longer 
stranger onlookers, but active participants 
in the meeting; we came into the body of 
the hall behind the president's bench, where 
on a sort of stage the members of the 
Government, official visitors, and so forth 
find accommodation. The presidential 
bench, the rostrum, and the reporters 

136 



THE PETERSBURG SOVIET 

remained, but instead of an atmosphere of 
weary parliamentarianism, we found our- 
selves in the crowding, the noise, and the 
peculiar thrill of a mass meeting. There 
were, I should think, some two hundred 
people or more packed upon the semi- 
circular benches round about us on the 
platform behind the president, comrades 
in naval uniforms and in middle-class and 
working-class costume, numerous intelli- 
gent-looking women, one or two Asiatics 
and a few unclassifiable visitors, and the 
body of the hall beyond the presidential 
bench was densely packed with people who 
filled not only the seats but the gangways 
and the spaces under the galleries. There 
may have been two or three thousand people 
down there, men and women. They were 
all members of the Petersburg Soviet, 
which is really a sort of conjoint meeting 
of its constituent Soviets. The visitors' 
galleries above were equally full. 

Above the rostrum, with his back to us, 
sat Zenovieff, his right-hand man Zorin, 
and the president. The subject under 

137 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

discussion was the proposed peace with 
Poland. The meeting was smarting with 
the sense of defeat and disposed to resent 
the Polish terms. Soon after we came in 
Zenovieff made a long and, so far as I could 
judge, a very able speech, preparing the 
minds of this great gathering for a Russian 
surrender. The Polish demands are out- 
rageous, but for the present Russia must 
submit. He was followed by an oldish 
man who made a bitter attack upon the 
irreligion of the people and government of 
Russia; Russia was suffering for her sins, 
and until she repented and returned to 
religion she would continue to suffer one 
disaster after another. His opinions were 
not those of the meeting, but he was 
allowed to have his say without interruption. 
The decision to make peace with Poland 
was then taken by a show of hands. Then 
came my little turn. The meeting was told 
that I had come from England to see the 
Bolshevik regime; I was praised profusely; 
I was also exhorted to treat that regime 
fairly and not to emulate those other recent 

138 



THE PETERSBURG SOVIET 

visitors (these were Mrs. Snowden and 
Guest and Bertrand Russell) who had 
enjoyed the hospitality of the republic and 
then gone away to say unfavourable things 
of it. This exhortation left me cold; I 
had come to Russia to judge the Bolshevik 
Government and not to praise it. I had 
then to take possession of the rostrum and 
address this big crowd of people. This 
rostrum I knew had proved an unfor- 
J:unate place for one or two previous 
visitors, who had found it hard to explain 
away afterwards the speeches their trans- 
lators had given the world through the 
medium of the wireless reports. Happily, 
I had had some inkling of what was coming. 
To avoid any misunderstanding I had 
written out a short speech in English, and 
I had had this translated carefully into 
Russian. I began by saying clearly that 
I was neither Marxist nor Communist, 
but a Collectivist, and that it was not to a 
social revolution in the West that Russians 
should look for peace and help in their 
troubles, but to the liberal opinion of the 

139 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

moderate mass of Western people. I 
declared that the people of the Western 
States were determined to give Russia 
peace, so that she might develop upon her 
own lines. Their own line of development 
might be very different from that of 
Russia. When I had done I handed a 
translation of my speech to my interpreter, 
Zorin, which not only eased his task but 
did away with any possibility of a subse- 
quent misunderstanding. My speech was 
reported in the Pravda quite fully and 
fairly. 

Then followed a motion by Zorin that 
Zenovieff should have leave to visit Berlin 
and attend the conference of the Indepen- 
dent Socialists there. Zorin is a witty and 
humorous speaker, and he got his audience 
into an excellent frame of mind. His 
motion was carried by a show of hands, 
and then came a report and a discussion 
upon the production of vegetables in the 
Petersburg district. It was a practical 
question upon which feeling ran high. 
Here speakers arose in the body of the hall, 

140 



THE PETERSBURG SOVIET 

discharging brief utterances for a minute 
or so and subsiding again. There were 
shouts and interruptions. The debate was 
much more like a big labour mass meeting 
in the Queen's Hall than anything that a 
Western European would recognise as a 
legislature. 

This business disposed of, a still more 
extraordinary thing happened. We who 
sat behind the rostrum poured down into 
the already very crowded body of the hall 
and got such seats as we could find, and 
a white sheet was lowered behind the 
president's seat. At the same time a band 
appeared in the gallery to the left. A 
five-part cinematograph film was then run, 
showing the Baku Conference to which I 
have already alluded. The pictures were 
viewed with interest but without any vio- 
lent applause. And at the end the band 
played the Internationale, and the audience 
— I beg its pardon! — ^the Petersburg Soviet 
dispersed singing that popular chant. It 
was in fact a mass meeting incapable of 
any real legislative activities; capable at 

141 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

the utmost of endorsing or not endorsing 
the Government in control of the plat- 
form. Compared with the British Parlia- 
ment it has about as much organisation, 
structure, and working efficiency as a big 
bagful of miscellaneous wheels might have 
beside an old-fashioned and inaccurate but 
still going clock. 



142 



VI. THE DREAMER IN THE 
KREMLIN 



VI 

THE DKEAMER IN THE KREMLIN 

MY chief purpose in going from Peters- 
burg to Moscow was to see and talk 
to Lenin. I was very curious to see him, 
and I was disposed to be hostile to him. 
I encountered a personality entirely differ- 
ent from anything I had expected to meet. 
Lenin is not a writer; his published 
work does not express him. The shrill 
little pamphlets and papers issued from 
Moscow in his name, full of misconcep- 
tions of the labour psychology of the West 
and obstinately defensive of the impossible 
proposition that it is the prophesied Marx- 
ist social revolution which has happened 
in Russia, display hardly anything of the 
real Lenin mentality as I encountered it. 
Occasionally there are gleams of an inspired 

145 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

shrewdness, but for the rest these pubhca- 
tions do no more than rehearse the set 
ideas and phrases of doctrinaire Marxism. 
Perhaps that is necessary. That may be 
the only language Communism under- 
stands; a break into a new dialect would 
be disturbing and demorahsing. Left 
Communism is the backbone of Russia 
to-day; unhappily it is a backbone without 
flexible joints, a backbone that can be bent 
only with the utmost difficulty and which 
must be bent by means of flattery and 
deference. 

Moscow under the bright October sun- 
shine, amidst the fluttering yellow leaves, 
impressed us as being altogether more lax 
and animated than Petersburg. There is 
much more movement of people, more 
trading, and a comparative plenty of drosh- 
kys. Markets are open. There is not the 
same general ruination of streets and 
houses. There are, it is true, many traces 
of the desperate street fighting of early 
1918. One of the domes of that absurd 
cathedral of St. Basil just outside the 

146 



DREAJMER IN THE KREMLIN 

Kremlin gate was smashed by a shell and 
still awaits repair. The tramcars we found 
were not carrying passengers; they were 
being used for the transport of supplies of 
food and fuel. In these matters Peters- 
burg claims to be better prepared than 
Moscow. 

The ten thousand crosses of Moscow 
still glitter in the afternoon light. On one 
conspicuous pinnacle of the Kremlin the 
imperial eagles spread their wings; the 
Bolshevik Government has been too busy 
or too indifferent to pull them down. The 
churches are open, the kissing of ikons is 
a flourishing industry, and beggars still 
woo casual charity at the doors. The 
celebrated miraculous shrine of the Iberian 
Madonna outside the Redeemer Gate was 
particularly busy. There were many peas- 
ant women, unable to get into the little 
chapel, kissing the stones outside. 

Just opposite to it, on a plaster panel on 
a house front, is that now celebrated in- 
scription put up by one of the early revo- 
lutionary administrations in Moscow: "Re- 

149 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

ligion is the Opium of the People." The 
eflFect this inscription produces is greatly 
reduced by the fact that in Russia the 
people cannot read. 

About that inscription I had a slight 
but amusing argument with Mr. Vander- 
Up, the American financier, who was lodged 
in the same guest house as ourselves. He 
wanted to have it effaced. I was for re- 
taining it as being historically interesting, 
and because I think that religious tolera- 
tion should extend to atheists. But Mr. 
Vanderlip felt too strongly to see the 
point of that. 

The Moscow Guest House, which we 
shared with Mr. Vanderlip and an adven- 
turous Enghsh artist who had somehow 
got through to Moscow to execute busts 
of Lenin and Trotsky, was a big, richly- 
furnished house upon the Sofiskaya Na- 
berezhnaya (No. 17), directly facing the 
great wall of the Kremlin and all the 
clustering domes and pinnacles of that im- 
perial inner city. We felt much less free 
and more secluded here than in Petersburg. 

150 



DREAMER IN THE KREMLIN 

There were sentinels at the gates to pro- 
tect us from casual visitors, whereas in 
Petersburg all sorts of unauthorised per- 
sons could and did stray in to talk to me. 
Mr. Vanderlip had been staying here, I 
gathered, for some weeks, and proposed to 
stay some weeks more. He was without 
valet, secretary, or interpreter. He did 
not discuss his business with me beyond 
telling me rather carefully once or twice 
that it was strictly financial and commer- 
cial and in no sense political. I was told 
that he had brought credentials from Sena- 
tor Harding to Lenin, but I am tempera- 
mentally incurious and I made no attempt 
whatever to verify this statement or to 
pry into Mr. Vanderlip's affairs. I did 
not even ask how it could be possible to 
conduct business or financial operations in 
a Communist State with anyone but the 
Government, nor how it was possible to 
deal with a Government upon strictly non- 
political lines. These were, I admitted, 
mysteries beyond my understanding. But 
we ate, smoked, drank our coffee and con- 

151 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

versed together in an atmosphere of pro- 
found discretion. By not mentioning Mr. 
Vanderlip's "mission," we made it a por- 
tentous, omnipresent fact. 

The arrangements leading up to my 
meeting with Lenin were tedious and irri- 
tating, but at last I found myself under 
way for the Kremlin in the company of 
Mr. Rothstein, formerly a figure in Lon- 
don Communist circles, and an American 
comrade with a large camera who was also, 
I gathered, an official of the Russian For- 
eign Office. 

The Kremlin as I remembered it in 
1914 was a very open place, open much 
as Windsor Castle is, with a thin trickle 
of pilgrims and tourists in groups and 
couples flowing through it. But now it 
is closed up and difficult of access. There 
was a great pother with passes and permits 
before we could get through even the outer 
gates. And we filtered and inspected 
through five or six rooms of clerks and 
sentinels before we got into the presence. 
This may be necessary for the personal 

152 



DREAMER IN THE KREMLIN 

security of Lenin, but it puts him out of 
reach of Russia, and, what perhaps is more 
serious, if there is to be an effectual dic- 
tatorship, it puts Russia out of his reach. 
If things must filter up to him, they 
must also filter down, and they may under- 
go very considerable changes in the process. 
We got to Lenin at last and found him, 
a little figure at a great desk in a well-lit 
room that looked out upon palatial spaces. 
I thought his desk was rather in a litter. 
I sat down on a chair at a corner of the 
desk, and the little man — ^his feet scarcely 
touch the ground as he sits on the edge of 
his chair — ^twisted round to talk to me, 
putting his arms round and over a pile of 
papers. He spoke excellent English, but 
it was, I thought, rather characteristic of 
the present condition of Russian affairs 
that Mr. Rothstein chaperoned the conver- 
sation, occasionally offering footnotes and 
other assistance. Meanwhile the American 
got to work with his camera, and unob- 
trusively but persistently exposed plates. 
The talk, however, was too interesting for 

153 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

that to be an annoyance. One forgot 
about that clicking and shifting about quite 
soon. 

I had come expecting to struggle with 
a doctrinaire Marxist. I found nothing of 
the sort. I had been told that Lenin lec- 
tured people; he certainly did not do so 
on this occasion. Much has been made of 
his laugh in the descriptions, a laugh 
which is said to be pleasing at first and 
afterwards to become cynical. This laugh 
was not in evidence. His forehead re- 
minded me of someone else — I could not 
remember who it was, until the other 
evening I saw Mr. Arthur Balfour sitting 
and talking imder a shaded light. It is 
exactly the same domed, slightly one-sided 
cranium. Lenin has a pleasant, quick- 
changing, brownish face, with a lively 
smile and a habit (due perhaps to some 
defect in focussing) of screwing up one 
eye as he pauses in his talk; he is not very 
like the photographs you see of him because 
he is one of those people whose change of 
expression is more important than their 

154 



DREAMER IN THE KREMLIN 

features; he gesticulated a little with his 
hands over the heaped papers as he talked, 
and he talked quickly, very keen on his 
subject, without any posing or pretences 
or reservations, as a good type of scientific 
man will talk. 

Our talk was threaded throughout and 
held together by two — what shall I call 
them? — motifs. One was from me to him: 
"What do you think you are making of 
Russia? What is the state you are trying 
to create?" The other was from him to 
me: *Why does not the social revolution 
begin in England? Why do you not work 
for the social revolution? Why are you 
not destroying Capitalism and establishing 
the Communist State?" These motifs 
interwove, reacted on each other, illumi- 
nated each other. The second brought 
back the first: "But what are you making 
of the social revolution? Are you making 
a success of it?" And from that we got 
back to two again with: "To make it a 
success the Western world must join in. 
Why doesn't it?" 

155 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

In the days before 1918 all the Marxist 
world thought of the social revolution as 
an end. The workers of the world were to 
unite, overthrow Capitalism, and be happy 
ever afterwards. But in 1918 the Com- 
munists, to their own surprise, found them- 
selves in control of Russia and challenged 
to produce their millennium. They have a 
colourable excuse for a delay in the pro- 
duction of a new and better social order 
in their continuation of war conditions, in 
the blockade and so forth, nevertheless it 
is clear that they begin to realise the 
tremendous unpreparedness which the 
Marxist methods of thought involve. A 
hundred points — I have already put a 
finger upon one or two of them — ^they do 
not know what to do. But the common- 
place Communist simply loses his temper 
if you venture to doubt whether every- 
thing is being done in precisely the best 
and most intelligent way under the new 
regime. He is like a tetchy housewife 
who wants you to recognise that every- 
thing is in perfect order in the middle of 

156 



DREAMER IN THE KREMLIN 

an eviction. He is like one of those now 
forgotten suffragettes who used to promise 
us an earthly paradise as soon as we es- 
caped from the tyranny of "man-made 
laws." Lenin, on the other hand, whose 
frankness must at times leave his disciples 
breathless, has recently stripped off the 
last pretence that the Russian revolution 
is anything more than the inauguration of 
an age of limitless experiment. "Those 
who are engaged in the formidable task 
of overcoming capitalism," he has recently 
written, "must be prepared to try method 
after method until they find the one which 
answers their purpose best." 

We opened our talk with a discussion of 
the future of the great tow^ns under Com- 
munism. I wanted to see how far Lenin 
contemplated the dying out of the towns 
in Russia. The desolation of Petersburg 
had brought home to me a point I had 
never realised before, that the whole form 
and arrangement of a town is determined 
by shopping and marketing, and that the 
abolition of these things renders nine- 

157 



V 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

f enths of the buildings in an ordinary town 
directly or indirectly unmeaning and use- 
less. "The towns will get very much small- 
er," he admitted. "They will be different. 
Yes, quite different." That, I suggested, 
implied a tremendous task. It meant the 
scrapping of the existing towns and their 
replacement. The churches and great build- 
ings of Petersburg would become presently 
like those of Novgorod the Great or like 
the temples of Paestum. Most of the 
town would dissolve away. He agreed 
quite cheerfully. I think it warmed his 
heart to find someone who understood a 
necessary consequence of collectivism that 
many even of his own people fail to grasp. 
Russia has to be rebuilt fundamentally, 
has to become a new thing. . . . , 

And industry has to be reconstructed — 
as fundamentally? 

Did I realise what was already in hand 
with Russia? The electrification of Russia? 

For Lenin, who like a good orthodox 
Marxist denounces all "Utopians," has suc- 
cumbed at last to a Utopia, the Utopia 

158 



DREAMER IN THE KREMLIN 

of the electricians. He is throwing all his 
weight into a scheme for the development 
of great power stations in Russia to serve 
whole provinces with light, with transport, 
and industrial power. Two experimental 
districts he said had already been electrified. 
Can one imagine a more courageous project 
in a vast flat land of forests and illiterate 
peasants, with no water power, with no 
technical skill available, and with trade 
and industry at the last gasp? Projects 
for such an electrification are in process 
of development in Holland and they have 
been discussed in England, and in those 
densely-populated and industrially highly- 
developed centres one can imagine them as 
successful, economical, and altogether bene- 
ficial. But their application to Russia is an 
altogether greater strain upon the con- 
structive imagination. I cannot see any- 
thing of the sort happening in this dark 
crystal of Russia, but this little man at the 
Kremlin can; he sees the decaying railways 
replaced by a new electric transport, sees 
new roadways spreading throughout the 

159 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

land, sees a new and happier Communist 
industrialism arising again. While I talked 
to him he almost persuaded me to share 
his vision. 

"And you will go on to these things 
with the peasants rooted in your soil?" 

But not only are the towns to be rebuilt ; 
every agricultural landmark is to go. 

"Even now," said Lenin, "all the agri- 
cultural production of Russia is not peasant 
production. We have, in places, large scale 
agriculture. The Government is already 
running big estates with workers instead 
of peasants, where conditions are favour- 
able. That can spread. It can be extended 
first to one province, then another. The 
peasants in the other provinces, selfish and 
illiterate, will not know what is happening 
until their turn comes. ..." 

It may be difficult to defeat the Russian 
peasant en masse; but in detail there is 
no difficulty at all. At the mention of the 
peasant L^n's head came nearer to mine; 
his manner became confidential. As if after 
all the peasant might overhear. 

160 



DREAMER IN THE KREMLIN 

It is not only the material organisation 
of society you have to build, I argued, it 
is the mentality of a whole people. The 
Russian people are by habit and tradition 
traders and individualists; their very souls 
must be remoulded if this new world is to 
be achieved. Lenin asked me what I had 
seen of the educational work afoot. I 
praised some of the things I had seen. 
He nodded and smiled with pleasure. He 
has an unshaken confidence in his work. 

"But these are only sketches and begin- 
nings," I said. 

"Come back and see what we have done 
in Russia in ten years' time," he answered. 

In him I realised that Communism could 
after all, in spite of Marx, be enormously 
creative. After the tiresome class-war 
fanatics I had been encountering among 
the Communists, men of formulse as sterile 
as flints, after numerous experiences of the 
trained and empty conceit of the common 
Marxist devotee, this amazing little man, 
with his frank admission of the immensity 
and complication of the project of Com- 

161 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

munism and his simple concentration upon 
its realisation, was very refreshing. He at 
least has a vision of a world changed over 
and planned and built afresh. 

He wanted more of my Russian impres- 
sions. I told him that I thought that in 
many directions, and more particularly in 
the Petersburg Commune, Communism was 
pressing too hard and too fast, and de- 
stroying before it was ready to rebuild. 
They had broken down trading before they 
were ready to ration; the co-operative 
organisation had been smashed up instead 
of being utilised, and so on. That brought 
us to our essential difference, the difference 
of the CoUectivist and Marxist, the question 
whether the social revolution is, in its ex- 
tremity, necessary, whether it is necessary 
to overthrow one social and economic sys- 
tem completely before the new one can 
begin. I believe that through a vast sus- 
tained educational campaign the existing 
Capitalist system could be civilised into a 
CoUectivist world system; Lenin on the 
other hand tied himself years ago to the 

162 



DREAJVIER IN THE KREMLIN 

Marxist dogmas of the inevitable class war, 
the downfall of Capitalist order as a pre- 
lude to reconstruction, the proletarian dic- 
tatorship, and so forth. He had to argue, 
therefore, that modern Capitalism is in- 
curably predatory, wasteful, and unteach- 
able, and that until it is destroyed it will 
continue to exploit the human heritage stu- 
pidly and aimlessly, that it will fight 
against and prevent any administration of 
national resources for the general good, 
and that it will inevitably make wars. 

I had, I will confess, a very uphill argu- 
ment. He suddenly produced Chiozza 
Money's new book, The Triumph of Na- 
tionalisation^ which he had evidently been 
reading very carefully. "But you see di- 
rectly you begin to have a good working 
coUectivist organisation of any public in- 
terest, the Capitalists smash it up again. 
They smashed your national shipyards; 
they won't let you work your coal eco- 
nomically." He tapped the book. "It is 
all here." 

And against my argument that wars 

163 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

sprang from nationalist imperialism and not 
from a Capitalist organisation of society 
he suddenly brought: "But what do you 
think of this new Republican Imperialism 
that comes to us from America?" 

Here Mr. Rothstein intervened in Rus- 
sian with an objection that Lenin swept 
aside. 

And regardless of Mr. Rothstein's plea 
for diplomatic reserve, Lenin proceeded to 
explain the projects with which one Ameri- 
can at least was seeking to dazzle the imag- 
ination of Moscow. There was to be eco- 
nomic assistance for Russia and recognition 
of the Bolshevik Government. There was 
to be a defensive alliance against Japanese 
aggression in Siberia. There was to be an 
American naval station on the coast of 
Asia, and leases for long terms of sixty or 
fifty years of the natural resources of 
Khamchatka and possibly of other large 
regions of Russian Asia. Well, did I think 
that made for peace? Was it anything 
more than the beginning of a new world 

164 




Behindhim stands Gorky: to the right of Gorky (i.e. on his left) are Zorin (hat) and 
Zenovieff. Behind with cigarette is Radek. 



DREAMER IN THE KREMLIN 

scramble? How would the British Im- 
perialists like this sort of thing? 

But some industrial power had to come 
in and help Russia, I said. She cannot 
reconstruct now without such help. . . . 

Our multifarious argumentation ended 
indecisively. We parted warmly, and I 
and my companion were filtered out of the 
Kremlin through one barrier after another 
in much the same fashion as we had been 
filtered in. 

"He is wonderful," said Mr. Rothstein. 
**But it was an indiscretion " 

I was not disposed to talk as we made 
our way, under the glowing trees that 
grow in the ancient moat of the Kremlin, 
back to our Guest House. I wanted to 
think Lenin over while I had him fresh 
in my mind, and I did not want to be 
assisted by the expositions of my compan- 
ion. But Mr, Rothstein kept on talking. 

He was still pressing me not to mention 
this little sketch of the Russian American 
outlook to Mr. Vanderlip long after I as- 
sured him that I respected Mr. Vanderlip's 

167 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

veil of discretion far too much to pierce 
it by any careless word. 

And so back to No. 17 Sofiskaya Na- 
berezhnaya, and lunch with Mr. Vander- 
lip and the young sculptor from London. 
The old servant of the house waited on 
us, mournfully conscious of the meagreness 
of our entertainment and reminiscent of 
the great days of the past when Caruso 
had been a guest and had sung to all that 
was brilliant in Moscow in the room up- 
stairs. Mr. Yanderlip was for visiting the 
big market that afternoon — and later go- 
ing to the Ballet, but my son and I were 
set upon returning to Petersburg that night 
and so getting on to Reval in time for 
the Stockholm boat. 



168 



Vn. THE ENVOY 



[VII 

THE ENVOY 

IN these seven papers I have written in 
the first person and in a famihar style 
because I did not want the reader to lose 
sight for a moment of the shortness of 
our visit to Russia and of my personal 
limitations. Now in conclusion, if the read- 
er will have patience with me for a few 
final words, I would like in less personal 
terms and very plainly to set down my 
main convictions about the Russian situa- 
tion. They are very strong convictions, and 
they concern not merely Russia but the 
whole present outlook of our civilisation. 
They are merely one man's opinion, but as 
I feel them strongly, so I put them without 
weakening qualifications. 

First, then, Russia, which was a modern 

171 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

civilisation of the Western type, least dis- 
ciplined and most ramshackle of all the 
Great Powers, is now a modern civilisation 
in extremis. The direct cause of its down- 
fall has been modern war leading to phys- 
ical exhaustion. Only through that could 
the Bolsheviki have secured power. Noth- 
ing like this Russian downfall has ever hap- 
pened before. If it goes on for a year 
or so more the process of collapse will be 
complete. Nothing will be left of Russia 
but a country of peasants; the towns will 
be practically deserted and in ruins, the 
railways will be rusting in disuse. With the 
railways will go the last vestiges of any 
general government. The peasants are ab- 
solutely illiterate and collectively stupid, 
capable of resisting interference but in- 
capable of comprehensive foresight and or- 
ganisation. They will become a sort of 
human swamp in a state of division, petty 
civil war, and political squalour, with a 
famine whenever the harvests are bad; 
and they will be breeding epidemics for 

172 



THE ENVOY 

the rest of Europe. They will lapse to- 
wards Asia. 

The collapse of the civilised system in 
Russia into peasant barbarism means that 
Europe will be cut off for many years 
from all the mineral wealth of Russia, and 
from any supply of raw products from 
this area, from its corn, flax, and the like. 
It is an open question whether the Western 
Powers can get along without these sup- 
plies. Their cessation certainly means a 
general impoverishment of Western Eu- 
rope. 

The only possible .Government that can 
stave oif such a final collapse of Russia 
now is the present Bolshevik Government, 
if it can be assisted by America and the 
Western Powers. There is now no alter- 
native to that Government possible. There 
are of course a multitude of antagonists — 
adventurers and the like — ready, with Euro- 
pean assistance, to attempt the overthrow 
of that Bolshevik Government, but there 
are no signs of any common purpose and 
moral unity capable of replacing it. And 

173 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

moreover there is no time now for an- 
other revolution in Russia. A year more 
of civil war will make the final sinking 
of Russia out of civilisation inevitable. 
We have to make what we can, therefore, 
of the Bolshevik Government, whether we 
like it or not. 

The Bolshevik Government is inexperi- 
enced and incapable to an extreme degree; 
it has had phases of violence and cruelty; 
but it is on the whole honest. And it 
includes a few individuals of real creative 
imagination and power, who may with op- 
poii:miity, if their hands are strengthened, 
achieve great reconstructions. The Bol- 
shevik Government seems on the whole to 
be trying to act up to its professions, which 
are still held by most of its supporters with 
a quite religious passion. Given generous 
help, it may succeed in estabhshing a new 
social order in Russia of a civilised type 
with which the rest of the world will be 
able to deal. It will probably be a miti- 
gated Communism, with a large-scale han- 

174 



THE ENVOY 

dling of transport, industry, and (later) 
agriculture. 

It is necessary that we should under- 
stand and respect the professions and prin- 
ciples of the Bolsheviki if we Western 
peoples are to be of any effectual service 
to humanity in Russia. Hitherto these 
professions and principles have been ig- 
nored in the most extraordinary way by 
the Western Governments. The Bolshevik 
Government is, and says it is, a Communist 
Government. And it means this, and will 
make this the standard of its conduct. It 
has suppressed private ownership and pri- 
vate trade in Russia, not as an act of ex- 
pediency but as an act of right; and in 
all Russia there remain now no commercial 
individuals and bodies with whom we can 
deal who will respect the conventions and 
usages of Western commercial life. The 
Bolshevik Government, we have to under- 
stand, has, by its nature, an invincible prej- 
udice against indi\adual business men; it 
will not treat them in a manner that they 
will consider fair and honourable; it will 

175 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

distrust them and, as far as it can, put them 
at the completest disadvantage. It regards 
them as pirates — or at best as privateers. 
It is hopeless and impossible therefore for 
individual persons and firms to think of go- 
ing into Russia to trade. There is only 
one being in Russia with whom the West- 
ern world can deal, and that is the Bolshe- 
vik Government itself, and there is no way 
of deahng with that one being safely and 
effectually except through some national 
or, better, some international Trust. This 
latter body, which might represent some 
single Power or group of Powers, or which 
might even have some titular connection 
with the League of Nations, would be able 
to deal with the Bolshevik Government on 
equal terms. It would have to recognise 
the Bolshevik Government and, in con- 
junction with it, to set about the now 
urgent task of the material restoration of 
civilised life in European and Asiatic Rus- 
sia. It should resemble in its general na- 
ture one of the big buying and controlling 
trusts that were so necessary and effectual 

176 



THE ENVOY 

in the European States during the Great 
War. It should deal with its individual 
producers on the one hand, and the Bolshe- 
vik Government would deal with its own 
population on the other. Such a Trust 
could speedily make itself indispensable to 
the Bolshevik Government. This indeed is 
the only way in which a capitalist State can 
hold commerce with a Communist State. 
The attempts that have been made during 
the past year and more to devise some 
method of private trading in Russia without 
recognition of the Bolshevik Government 
were from the outset as hopeless as the 
search for the North-West passage from 
England to India. The channels are frozen 
up. 

Any country or group of countries with 
adequate industrial resources which goes 
into Bolshevik Russia with recognition and 
help will necessarily become the supporter, 
the right hand, and the consultant of the 
Bolshevik Government. It will react upon 
that Government and be reacted upon. It 
will probably become more coUectivist in 

177 



RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

its methods, and, on the other hand, the 
rigours of extreme Communism in Russia 
will probably be greatly tempered through 
its influence. 

The only Power capable of playing this 
role of eleventh-hour helper to Russia sin- 
gle-handed is the United States of America. 
Other Powers than the United States will, 
in the present phase of world-exhaustion, 
need to combine before they can be of any 
effective use to Russia. Big business is by 
no means antipathetic to Communism. The 
larger big business grows the more it ap- 
proximates to Collectivism. It is the upper 
road of the few instead of the lower road 
of the masses to Collectivism. 

The only alternative to such a helpful 
intervention in Bolshevik Russia is, I firmly 
beheve, the final collapse of all that remains 
of modern civiKsation throughout what was 
formerly the Russian Empire. It is highly 
improbable that the collapse will be limited 
to its boundaries. Both eastward and west- 
ward other great regions may, one after 
another, tumble into the big hole in civihsa- 

178 



THE envoy; 

tion thus created. Possibly all modern 
civilisation may tumble in. 

These propositions do not refer to any 
hypothetical future; they are an attempt 
to state the outline facts and possibilities 
of what is going on — and going on with 
great rapidity — in Russia and in the world 
generally now, as they present themselves 
to my mind. This in general terms is the 
frame of circumstance in which I would 
have the sketches of Russia that have 
preceded this set and read. So it is I 
interpret the writing on the Eastern wall 
of Europe. 



THE END 



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